F1 News: Mercedes Confirms Porpoising Issue - "It Definitely Affects Performance"

Mercedes has confirmed that the bouncing is back after Spa.

According to both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell over the weekend of the Belgian Grand Prix, their Mercedes W14 had resumed porpoising, after a sting of the car behaving in that area. Now, the CTO of the team Mike Elliott, has revealed that this is unlikely due to any upgrades they'd recently applied to the car, but as I expected, a setup issue. 

2022 was difficult for the Brackley team as it suffered from porpoising - much worse than any other team on the grid. But as the sport moved into the current season and teams were starting to understand more the limitations of ground-effect aerodynamics, the W14 started to behave itself. And while it wasn't showing the performance the 7-time champion expected from his car, it had stopped bouncing.

Unfortunately for the Mercedes drivers, this didn't last, as the Spa race was plagued with bouncing from both cars. 

Fortunately, Elliott believes this was a setup issue, what I assume stemmed from the lack pf dry practicing during the sprint weekend. 

“We definitely had an amount of bouncing this weekend, both drivers were telling us that and we could see it in the data," he acknowledged. 

“We could also see an amount of bouncing on the other cars and I think some of it is the nature of the circuit at Spa and in fact we had huge amounts of bouncing last year as did most teams.

“In teams of the performance, it definitely affects the performance of the cars because it affects the drivers’ ability to extract the maximum grip from the car, it affects their balance and it affects their ability to get their braking points right. So that is something we will be working on for the future.” 

It's therefore likely that the bouncing can be tuned out of the car, but it might not be so easy as the team continue to push their performance further. 

"We need to determine the extent to which this is a consequence of the specific circuit, Spa in this case, versus potential setup issues," he continued. "It's important to remember that it was a wet race weekend with no dry running until we were in the actual race."