Toto Wolff says Mercedes will have to analyse the bouncing issue that they faced during the F1 Belgian GP but he doesn’t think their direction is an issue.
It was a mixed weekend for Mercedes in F1 Belgian GP where Lewis Hamilton finished fourth and George Russell climbed back up to sixth after a recovery drive. But post race, both drivers noted about the return of bouncing issues that they faced before.
‘Porpoising’ as it is known as diminished as the teams found a solution, but with the new updates from Mercedes, they faced that issue especially on the straights which made it difficult for both Hamilton and Russell manage the pace and performance.
There will be analysis done in the summer break where the floor seems to be the likely cause for bouncing. “I’ve seen the data and spoken to the drivers, the main limiting factor in Spa was the bouncing, the car is just bouncing literally on every straight,” said Wolff to media. “Even Blanchimont was a corner that Lewis had to lift, which is an easy flat normally, and you’re bouncing on the straight, you overheat the tyres under braking.
“So that is a vicious circle and was the main limiting factor this weekend. It’s frustrating to check out for the holidays like this but we’ve got to understand more based on the data. We’ve got to analyse it. There is so much hard work that’s been going on and the upgrade, the aero guys, and the operations to deliver that upgrade, you’ve got to take your hat off.
“I think the floor could have been the reason why we’ve been bouncing, but we’re going to see it in the data, and maybe there’s something that we need to find, because I still believe the direction that we’re going now is the right one,” summed up Wolff. Looking into the problem, CTO Mike Elliott expanded on the bouncing issue further.
He concurs with Wolff about analysing the new update kit if that caused the problem. But he also notes if the circuit played a role considering the amount of porpoising seen at Spa in previous years. “We definitely had an amount of bouncing this weekend, both drivers were telling us that and we could see it in the data,” he said.
“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. The question we need to ask ourselves is, how much of it is just the circuit we were at in Spa and how much is to be found in setup because obviously it was a wet race weekend, a weekend where we had no dry running up until the point we were actually racing. We will also take a really good look at the upgrade kit and make sure that we’ve not introduced bouncing with that but at the moment our belief is it is probably a result of setup or the circuit itself.”
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