15 March 2024 , 14:00
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Mercedes will use the Australian Grand Prix weekend to "experiment" with its W15 car to figure out how they can help Lewis Hamilton fight closer to the front.
So far, the seven-time world champion has been some way off doing that. He finished seventh in Bahrain, 50 seconds adrift of race-winner Max Verstappen. And a week later in Jeddah he was a similar distance away from the Red Bull - but scored even fewer points down in ninth.
High-speed corners are an obvious weakness of the W15 while bouncing has re-emerged as an issue, especially when the car is low on fuel. To get on top of it, Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said the team plans to get creative in Melbourne.
He said: "There's definitely data that we're picking through from Jeddah. We're also looking at data from the Bahrain race, Bahrain test, and we will come up with a plan for how we approach free practice in Melbourne. But it's not just based on what we did in Jeddah.
"There's a lot of work going on within the aerodynamics department, vehicle dynamics department. We're trying to design some experiments there that will hopefully give us a direction that's good for performance."
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Team principal Toto Wolff has already admitted that the team does not know exactly why the high-speed corners are such a problem for the car. What he is sure of is that it goes beyond simply a lack of downforce from the rear wing.
And Shovlin concurred that it seems to be a cocktail of problems rather than one single simple fix. He added: "It's a few things. One of them was the balance wasn't great. So those very fast corners, the walls aren't particularly far away - 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.
"You can easily imagine how unsettling that is for the drivers. Now, that was a factor in qualifying and the race. In qualifying we were also suffering a bit with the bouncing. That was less of a problem in the race. There's more fuel on the car. You're going a bit slower. And that seemed to calm down, and wasn't such an issue.
"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."
Still, Hamilton insists he is enjoying driving the car - just not as far down the leaderboard as he currently is. He said after the Jeddah race: "I wouldn't say I'm having fun. I'm racing for ninth, so I definitely can't say that. Finishing ninth is definitely not fun. But I am enjoying the actual racing part. And I was hunting and I was pushing as hard as I could, I was maximising everything I had with the car, I was right on the edge."