Anyway, no matter how aggrieved the FIA felt, all the chatter in the paddock was aimed squarely at them.

The major social media platforms were all in a full-on flame war over this.

Qin Miao, on the other hand, was just watching from the sidelines, since he knew Toto was the one behind this technical directive.

And judging from how things looked now, the directive Toto pushed through did indeed achieve what it was supposed to do.

But the effect of this technical directive just didn’t live up to what Mercedes had expected; it only did half the job.

The knife that was originally meant for Red Bull and Ferrari only managed to chop Ferrari; Red Bull came out untouched and actually ended up faster.

Ferrari, on the other hand, got absolutely wrecked by this one cut—after the summer break they couldn’t even keep up with Mercedes.

Bottom line, Qin Miao is just a guy who drives the car; he doesn’t really get all the twists and turns of paddock politics. What he wants to know right now is whether the upgrades the team is bringing to next week’s Dutch Grand Prix can fix the car’s current lack of performance.

Speaking of the Dutch Grand Prix, Qin Miao couldn’t help feeling a bit jinxed by it.

Red Bull’s home races seem to be a bit too many.

On one hand, the Austria Grand Prix is Red Bull’s home race, which is fair enough. On the other hand, since Perez is Mexican, the Mexico Grand Prix also counts as a Red Bull home race, and the just-finished Belgium Grand Prix basically counted as a Red Bull home race too.

Because Verstappen’s mom is Belgian, most of the locals in the crowd at the Belgium Grand Prix were supporting Red Bull.

This Dutch Grand Prix is also effectively a Red Bull home race, because Pan is Dutch.

One team, four home Grands Prix.

Meanwhile over at Mercedes, they only really have the British Grand Prix as their home race.

After all, there’s still no news about Qin Miao’s home race, the China Grand Prix, coming back to the calendar.

Anyway, next week’s Dutch Grand Prix is Verstappen’s home race.

And Qin Miao has already foreseen it: with Red Bull’s car inherently more suited to the Zandvoort circuit, they’ll probably bring home another one-two at the Dutch Grand Prix next week.

Right now, all Qin Miao hopes for is that during the Dutch Grand Prix, the upgrades the team brings can meaningfully improve the car’s performance—at least shrink that jaw-dropping gap in lap time between Mercedes and Red Bull a little.

After the race, Qin Miao flew back to the UK.

He took one night to rest at home, and the next day he was called into the team factory.

At the factory, Qin Miao got a piece of reasonably good news.

For next week’s Dutch Grand Prix, the team will be bringing an upgrade to the sidepods.

This new sidepod upgrade is based on the new W13 chassis architecture, still sticking to Mercedes’ zero-pod concept, with the whole thing tightening down into a coke-bottle shape, wider in front and narrower at the back.

The new sidepods do look a bit different: there are more bulges to guide airflow, and they’ve added a few extra flow conditioners on top that can work together with the floor’s vortex generators to seal in the high-pressure airflow inside the floor.

Most importantly, the new sidepods shave off 500g of weight and also leave some room for future modifications to the car.

The only downside is that they increase the car’s overall frontal area, so drag is up by quite a bit.

Of course, compared with dropping 500g, that bit of extra drag isn’t a big deal.

Don’t be fooled by how small 500g sounds—some people eat more than that in a single meal.

But that 500g can give Qin Miao about 0.04 seconds per lap, let his tyres go one lap longer, and allow him to start the race with 500g less fuel.

Plus the aero gains on top of that, the car has plenty of potential; it’s worth looking forward to.

That said, in the team meeting, Qin Miao’s satisfaction with the upgrades didn’t quite line up with everyone else’s.

Hamilton spoke up actively in the meeting and solemnly demanded, "What about the shifted cockpit? Where’s my cockpit moved back?!"

Qin Miao took a pretty chill view of the upgrades: as long as there are upgrades and the car’s performance clearly improves, he’s happy.

But Hamilton really, really wants the team to push that damned cockpit back by a centimetre or two to change the car’s overall balance.

But the team honestly doesn’t have any better options right now. Once you’ve changed the chassis, reworking and replacing the old components is a gradual process, and moving the driver’s cockpit is the hardest and most time-consuming change of the lot.

Because once you move the cockpit, things like the engine, the air intake, the cooling system, the floor—they all have to be redesigned accordingly.

Right now, the only things that have changed are the chassis and the sidepods.

Being able to complete even these modifications in such a short time is already the team operating at over 100%.

Originally, the team had planned to only bring this sidepod upgrade for Singapore; getting it done this early was already ahead of schedule.

The team really doesn’t have the production capacity right now to modify that many parts of the car all at once.

And this is a massive project.

Because everything has to be improved step by step, even the upgraded components will still carry a certain amount of design compatibility for the previous spec parts.

Once all the upgrades on the car are finally complete, they’ll still need time to strip out those compatibility features to hit the goals of weight reduction or shrinking the components’ projected area.

You eat a meal one bite at a time, and you walk a road one step at a time.