More WOES for Mercedes: 'We have unknown fundamental problems'

After a long period of dominance, things are not going so smoothly for Mercedes. In Saudi Arabia, George Russell finished sixth and Lewis Hamilton ninth. The Mercedes team has yet to manage a podium this season.

Andrew Shovlin explains in the Mercedes Race Debrief that the two cars are pretty much the same at the start of the weekend in terms of set-up. During the weekend, the cars are then adjusted based on driver feedback. So in terms of set-up, the cars are not the same going into the race. Mercedes drivers again complained about the car bouncing.

"So, we were looking at ways of trying to improve that. You can play with ride heights, you can play with stiffness and that all seems effective. And also they were just trying to tune the balance through the speed range. So what's the car like in the low speed? What's it like in the high speed? Now the balance that we had in that session probably wasn't as good as FP1. And from there on, we started to converge back in the general direction of where we came from arriving there. But the learning of it is just that when you change things you can see the differences," Shovlin said.

Mercedes has fundamental problems

So despite the cars running with different set-ups, the problems were the same for both cars. "So one car making changes, you can see how it performs run to run. We can also look at the global performance of the two cars but fundamentally the limitations that we had in qualifying and the race, they were broadly the same for both. So it's telling you it's not a small difference, it's not a tiny bit of camber or a spring or bar here and there. It's something more fundamental that we need to dig into and understand."

Shovlin says the team learned from these things in Jeddah and Bahrain, and now it's a matter of finding solutions for Melbourne. "There's definitely data that we're picking through from Jeddah. We're also looking at data from Bahrain race, Bahrain test and we will come up with a plan for how we approach free practice in Melbourne. But it's not just based on what we did in Jeddah. There's a lot of work going on within aerodynamics department, vehicle dynamics department. We're trying to design some experiments there that will hopefully give us a direction that's good for performance."