Mercedes endured a difficult begin to the 2024 Formula 1 season in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia; watch the Australian Grand Prix reside on Sky Sports F1 from Friday, with lights out for Sunday’s race at 4am

Mercedes have admitted they’re engaged on fixing “fundamental issues” with their W15 automobile after a disappointing begin to the 2024 Formula 1 season.

Having entered the brand new marketing campaign with hopes of being Red Bull’s nearest challengers, Mercedes failed to position a automobile within the prime 4 in both Bahrain or Saudi Arabia as Max Verstappen led team-mate Sergio Perez to dominant one-twos.

Lewis Hamilton, who has been outperformed by team-mate George Russell in each races, stated after ending ninth in Jeddah that “big changes” are nonetheless required past the overhaul that was meant to have superior their underperforming automobiles of the final two years.

In the staff’s on-line race debrief, Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin defined how experimenting with the setup of the W15 throughout follow did not end in vital progress.

“We started to converge back in the general direction of where we came from arriving there,” Shovlin stated.

“But the learning of it is just that when you change things you can see the differences. So one car making changes, you can see how it performs run to run.

“We may take a look at the worldwide efficiency of the 2 automobiles however basically the constraints that we had in qualifying and the race, they had been broadly the identical for each.

“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.”

Following the back-to-back opening races, the season resumes with the Australian Grand Prix from Friday in Melbourne.

Shovlin is hopeful that having extra time to organize might allow Mercedes to search out some fixes.

“There’s definitely data that we’re picking through from Jeddah,” he added. “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 is not simply primarily based on what we did in Jeddah. There’s loads of work occurring inside aerodynamics division, automobile dynamics division.

“We’re trying to design some experiments there that will hopefully give us a direction that’s good for performance.”

Concerningly for Mercedes, Melbourne’s Albert Park Circuit has some similarities to Jeddah, the place their weaknesses had been most obvious.

“The balance wasn’t great,” Shovlin added. “So those very fast corners, the walls aren’t particularly far away. So the ones where the driver wants a lot of confidence, and quite often we were snapping to oversteer if they really leant on the tyres.

“And you possibly can simply think about how unsettling that’s for the drivers. Now, that was a think about a qualifying and the race. In qualifying we had been additionally struggling a bit with the bouncing. Now that was much less of an issue within the race. There’s extra gasoline on the automobile. You’re going a bit slower. And that appeared to settle down and wasn’t such a problem.

“And then the big one is we don’t really have enough grip there. So that’s one of the things that we are working hard on this week because Melbourne has similar nature of corners. So we’re doing a lot of work to try and understand why did we not seem to have the grip of some of our close competitors.”

One of Mercedes’ largest issues since F1’s regulation modifications had been launched for 2022 has been a scarcity of straight-line velocity, however they had been really had one of many quickest automobiles on the straights in Jeddah.

Shovlin is hopeful that the staff will not have to surrender this development to revive efficiency in different areas.

“We were actually one of the fastest cars, if not the fastest car in a straight line,” he stated. “So we were on quite a lot a light wing level.

“And what we might do is gradual ourselves down in sector two and three to attempt to recuperate a little bit of that point in sector one. But ideally we would prefer to hold that and work out a strategy to attempt to enhance sector one by means different than simply placing a lot more downforce on the automobile after which paying the value for it on the straights.”

Formula 1’s largest ever season continues with the Australian Grand Prix from March 22-24, reside on Sky Sports F1. Stream every F1 race and more with a NOW Sports Month Membership – just £21 a month for 12 months. No contract, cancel anytime

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