Lewis Hamilton’s frustration with his Mercedes car is growing after another difficult Friday at the Australian Grand Prix.
After claiming P7 in the first session, the seven-time world champion slipped to 13th in FP2 at Albert Park with teammate George Russell only two places better in P11.
And speaking afterwards, Hamilton admitted the main problem Mercedes has is finding car setup solutions that actually deliver the expected improvements.
“I feel ok, it was just a difficult session,” he said reflecting on his Friday.
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“It is just nothing you change on the car makes a difference at the moment so that is the difficult thing. You get in very optimistic and then you make changes and it doesn’t seem to be wanting to improve.
“We made some changes going into FP2. FP1 was better and FP2 was harder for us. I don’t know, just a tricky car.”
Last time out in Jeddah, Hamilton suffered his first Q1 exit in five years and with the midfield group so tightly packed, he fears qualifying could be another struggle.
“There is just not a lot we can do. This is the way it is so we just have to drive with it,” he claimed.
“That is the frustrating thing because you are trying to push and when you do a decent lap, you are 1.2 seconds down so it is just difficult.”
Mercedes started the day trialling rear wing levels before opting for the higher downforce configuration as used in Bahrain.
But in doing so, it has once again triggered the bouncing which has been the nemesis of the W13 so far.
“We’re definitely porpoising pretty bad,” Russell said. “Into turn nine it’s probably the most severe I’ve experienced.
“I think it’s something we just have to deal with for the time being. We believe it’s the fastest way around the track.
“But maybe it’s not. We need to keep digging into the data and understand. We’ve sort of gone from left, right and centre with the set-up and all resulted in a similar outcome so we need to try and get on top of things and understand what happened.”
In Jeddah, George managed to optimise the performance and sit in the gap between Red Bull, Ferrari and the rest, but doing that again in Australia appears a tougher task.
“We’re not in the position where we want to be, there are quite a few midfield cars ahead of us and obviously quite a long way from the pace of the front. So we need to work hard tonight and understand the limitations,” the Briton acknowledged.
“The car felt alright, it didn’t feel too bad. But it was a bit strange, on my soft tyre I kept on improving and improving. I know a few drivers did that, but it seemed a little bit more extravagant from my side of things.”
