Lewis Hamilton says he had to experiment with “everything” on the W13 in the early days, as Mercedes struggled to understand where their performance was lacking.
In the initial few races the engineers struggled to understand how to fix the problems relating to the porpoising and straight line pace.
Speaking in an interview with BBC, Hamilton says he needed to experiment a lot with the car setup to know what was working and feedback to the engineers.
“Literally, I have tried everything,” he says. “I’ve tried every setting you can possibly do. That’s what I was doing at the beginning of the year.”
Hamilton: ‘It was about problem solving’
The problems with the W13 created an inaccurate representation of Hamilton’s true pace, as he struggled to match his previous years’ success.
This was largely due to the ‘trial and error’ approach he was taking to each race weekend, rather than thinking about how he can refine the car to beat main rivals Ferrari and Red Bull.
He added: “The whole idea of performing at your best and getting the best result each weekend; of course that would be nice, but I was really about problem solving: ‘I will sacrifice this session or all the sessions to be able to find more data and information for you.’
“[This is] so that when we go back to the factory they’ve [team] got a better understanding of what’s going on.’ But it ultimately prevented some of the weekends.”
