Russell and Wolff explain Mercedes woes, but can they turn it around?

The heart of the problem is the porpoising that all teams encountered from the start of the Barcelona test last month. Some soon found ways to dial it out or control it without compromising performance, or discovered what parameters turned it in on and off and thus worked out a development route to address it properly further down the line. Mercedes is by its own admission still floundering.

The fundamental issue is that the W13 was designed to work at an optimum ride height, and only by jacking it up does the porpoising go away and the car become driveable over a lap, never mind a race distance. And by doing that performance is compromised.

“The only way to run is to raise the car very high,” Russell explained. “And obviously with this ground effects car, we lose all of the downforce. So we know that if we can get the car on the ground, there’s a huge chunk of lap time there.

“So it’s all well and good saying that, but we can’t physically achieve that right now. We need to have a re-think.”

“Porpoising is something that caught all of the teams out when they first launched this generation of cars just a few weeks ago,” chief technical officer James Allison noted after Bahrain.

“The mechanisms that cause it, while not completely understood yet, are rather different from what the commentators are providing on the web and on your TV screens. How quickly each team can get on top of it and fix it is going to be quite an important thing for determining what the pecking order in the sport will be.

“We were caught out by it quite badly, especially when we put our first race upgrade package on in the last winter test, the amount of porpoising we saw has been quite extreme.

“We are having to throw away the basic performance of our car as a smaller problem, in order to get the bigger problem – the uncontrollable bouncing – slightly under our control.”

The team hoped to have a better handle on it in Jeddah, a very different type of track with a newer surface and fewer bumps than Bahrain, but that didn’t prove to be the case.

“I think we are not running the car where we wanted to run it,” team boss Toto Wolff noted. “And therefore it’s very difficult to really assess what the lap time deficit is if we were able to run the car lower. And I would very much hope that the gap is much closer to what we’ve seen today. But there’s deficits everywhere.”

In such difficult circumstances it’s normal for teams to roll the dice, split the cars and pursue different routes, and in Jeddah Hamilton side of the garage was less successful.

“We’re still experimenting with set-ups to find out where the sweet spot of the car is.,” said Wolff. “And so on Lewis’s side, they went a bit bolder. And the outcome was that, basically, they had no rear end in the car. And that explains that big lap time deficit [to Russell.]

“That was not a huge set of changes that happened. But they were big enough to have dramatic consequences on the performance of the car, between going out in Q1 and making it into Q3.

“That’s why this car is so tricky to set up. We had a lower drag rear wing, we took the Gurney off, but still it wasn’t enough to shave more drag off the car.

“But generally, I would say this isn’t a single problem. We have many parts of the car that don’t work, that we don’t understand, they don’t perform enough. And this is not where we all expect the car to be.”

Russell provided an intriguing insight into just why it’s proving so difficult for the team to come up with solutions on race weekends.

“I think on Lewis’s side of the garage they probably went a bit more conservative with the set-up than we did,” he said after the race.

“And that was the difference. It’s a real fine line [with] getting the car in the right window. There’s so many factors at play when we’re bouncing – the mechanical stiffness of the car, and then the stiffness of the floors, the design of the floors, tyre pressures – that sometimes we change the set-up, we think we’ve improved, but it actually makes it slightly worse – it’s seemingly a little bit inconsistent.

“Engine mode as well – the faster you go the worse it gets, so it makes it harder for qualifying, because we turn the engines up, maximum power, and go quicker down the straight, which causes more downforce, and causes more porpoising.

“So we almost need to pre-empt this issue. And also in the race when you have the DRS closed you have more downforce than you do with the DRS open, and that’s another factor we need to consider. So we’re still learning, and that’s why we’re far from optimal. As I said if we solve porpoising, that would cure I would say 99% of our issues.”

The focus on sorting fundamental problems means that there’s been less work on the sort of fine-tuning that any title chasing team needs to do to get the best out of a constantly evolving package, especially in terms of understanding the new tyres.

James Allison remains hopeful that there’s light at the end of the Brackley wind tunnel.

“We are carrying a lot of problems and a lot of problems that all have solutions and all of those solutions are within our compass to deliver,” he said after Bahrain.

“The way in which we are approaching the problems and the way in which we will bring solutions also gives me some comfort that we will get back to a competitive car quite swiftly and that we will be able to pursue the objective we have of championships.

“It is a big job, it is an ambitious car, some will argue that perhaps we have bitten off more than we can chew with it.

“It’s just not an option to stay where we are” Toto Wolff

“But we are very good chewers in this team and we intend to put these problems right as quickly as possible, hopefully in the next two or three races, but in any case we will put them right and we will get our car back at the front of the grid competing as we all intend to, to allow us to pursue our dream of championship success.”

For team boss Wolff, being on the back foot is a new experience, and he’s determined to turn things around.

“I love competition, and I’ve always loved competition,” says the Austrian. “And we had a really strong run of eight years where we were leading the pack. Not always, but we kind of managed our way into the lead.

“And this time for me feels a little bit like 2013, where we just weren’t up to the speed with the Red Bull, and probably also not with the Ferraris. But we kept fighting, and this is how I feel at the moment. It’s certainly totally unacceptable, where we are on performance. We’re third on the road, sometimes not even. It’s just not an option to stay where we are.”