Mercedes yet to solve F1 car porpoising problem after experiments 

After Lewis Hamilton and George Russell finished third and fourth in the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix, Mercedes’ technical chief James Allison said the team hoped to get on top of the aerodynamic issues it is facing within ‘two or three’ races. 

Mercedes trialed different set-up and rear wing configurations on both W13 cars during the two 60 minute practice sessions on Friday in a bid to improve the situation, but the experiments did not fully address the problem.

“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,” Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin explained. 

“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 admitted the team still has “many of the same problems” it faced in Bahrain and stressed Mercedes is still lacking straight-line speed. 

“We still have many of the same problems we had in the last race but we're working through them,” Hamilton said. 

“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.