Mercedes set-up trials in Jeddah F1 practice didn’t solve porpoising

The Brackley-based outfit has faced a challenge in dialing out its car bouncing on the straights without compromising performance, with Lewis Hamilton lauding his third place in last weekend’s Bahrain season-opener as the “the best result we could have gotten”.

Mercedes is adamant that once it has a better understanding of what it needs to do to sort the porpoising issue, then it will be able to unlock the full potential of its W13 car.

But despite extensive work in the two practice sessions at the Jeddah circuit on Friday, Mercedes still does not think it has found an answer to eradicate the phenomenon completely.

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said: “We tried a few more experiments to understand the bouncing issue here, some which made it worse, some which helped, but we don’t yet have a solution to make the problem go away.

“We can reduce this slightly for [Saturday] as it’s affecting the drivers in a few of the corners and costing time.”

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W13

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

While Mercedes was still behind Ferrari and Red Bull in pace terms on Friday, Shovlin said the team felt more on top of its package that it did last weekend.

“Compared to Bahrain, the car balance is in a better place and in terms of degradation we’re quite happy with what we have seen,” he said.

“Our single lap still needs a bit of work but we’ve got the session tomorrow to do that. Overall though, a reasonable day but clearly we still have a bit of work to do before we’ll be troubling Red Bull or Ferrari.”

Hamilton reckoned that one area where Mercedes needed to improve its performance was in its straightline speed, despite the team having opted for a lower-drag wing this weekend.

The Briton said: “We still have many of the same problems we had in the last race but we’re working through them.

“It’s definitely a little bit harder here with the high-speed corners, but the grip is really good on the track and we just need to find some speed on the straights.”