F1 News: Mercedes Still Suffering From Porpoising Issues Ahead Of Saudi Arabian Grand Prix
Mercedes struggled at last weekends Bahrain Grand Prix with porpoising issues and have still not found a solution for these issues ahead of this weeks Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
Although the team had these issues, Lewis Hamilton bagged himself a podium place finishing third and George Russell finished in fourth place. Mercedes technical chief, James Allison, said after the Bahrain GP that they hoped to get these aerodynamic problems sorted within two to three races.
In order to hopefully address the issue, Mercedes had different rear wing configurations on both of the car during Fridays practice sessions but the team did still not see the results they would have hoped for.
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.
“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.
“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, who was coming back to this season with “attack mode” has said that his team are still experiencing some of the problems that they had in Bahrain:
“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.
