Mercedes could solve current F1 issues in ‘two to three races’

Mercedes started off the season struggling for performance behind Ferrari and Red Bull.

While Mercedes did come away from Bahrain with third and fourth, Lewis Hamilton was running around 30 seconds behind eventual race winner Charles Leclerc before the late-race Safety Car caused by Pierre Gasly.

Porpoising has been at the core of the W13’s problems with its upgrade package for the second test appearing to worsen the issue.

Mercedes has been forced to compromise its car setup to keep the bouncing effect under control and as a result, it loses lap time.

Speaking in Mercedes’ post-race debrief video on the team’s YouTube channel, Allison said the team is keen to find a porpoising solution to avoid “throwing away the underlying performance of the car”.

“We are starting to get it under control but at the moment we are getting it under control a little bit by 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,” he said.

“In the coming weeks and of course with massive, massive pressure on us to make sure we deliver this quickly, we will find improvements that get on top of the bouncing while not throwing away the underlying performance of the car in order to do so.

“We can’t obviously wait to deliver those solutions, we are hard at work back here in the factory to find them, make them, get them to the car and then enjoy the benefits of them and hopefully start to realise some of the inherent goodness that we have built into this car that should put us back up where we want to be at the front-end of the grid.”

Allison estimated that the deficit to Ferrari and Red Bull is currently 0.6s, better than what he expected after pre-season testing.

Despite Mercedes’ woes, Allison is confident the team will turn it around and could do so as early as the next ‘two to three races’.

“We are something like 0.6 of a second, maybe more, off the pace of the leaders in Bahrain but 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 added.

“Yes, it is challenging but actually after winter testing I’d feared worse and I think actually the performance improvement we’ve managed to deliver from winter testing to the first race while perhaps not visible to the fans and perhaps not reassuring to the fans, is reassuring in house here within the team and what we have ahead of us, 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 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.”