Mercedes have explained what they believe was behind their poor performance in high-speed corners during the F1 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

After a challengin♔g start to the 2024 season in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff admitted the team is battling a “fundamental” issue with their revamped W15 F1 car.

Mercedes’ high-speed weakness was exposed during the Jeddah weekend, leaving168澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果历史: Lewis Hamilton feeling like he was “in a different category” compared to his rivals as he in🐼sisted “big changes” were needed to challenge Red Bull for wins this year.

“Fundamentally ⛄the limitations that we had in qualifying and the race, they were br☂oadly the same for both,” Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin explained.

“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 in🐠to and understand.”

When asked what caused the time loss in the h🎉igh-spe𒀰ed corners, Shovlin replied: “It’s a few things. One of them was the balance wasn’t great.

“So those very fast corners [where] the walls aren’t particularly far away [are] the ones wheꦺre 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 for the drivers. That was a factor in qualifying and the race.

“In qualifying we were als🌱o suffering a bit with the bouncing. That was less of a problem꧟ in the race: There’s more fuel in the car, you’re going a bit slower and that seemed to calm it down and it wasn’t such an issue

“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 a simi💯lar nature of corners. 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.”

Shovlin stressed Mercedes have no intention to sacrifice their stren♊gths in other areas in order to address their main weakness.

“We were actually one of the fastest cars, if not the fastest car, in a straight line,” Shovlin said. “So we’re on quite a light wing level and what we could do is slow ourselves down in sector two𒈔 and three to try and rec🅰over a bit of that time in sector one.

“But ideally we’d like to keep that and work out a way to try and improve se𒈔ctor one by means other than just putting a load more downforce on the car and then payi💝ng the price for it on the straight.”

And Mercedes are planning “experiments” to try out at next week’s Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne in a bid to get to the bottom of th♛e issue.

“There’s definitely data that we’re picking through from Jeddah,” Shovlin added. “We’re also looking at data from the Bahrain race and the Bahrain test and we’ll come up wi🍸th a plan for how we approach free practiꦰce in Melbourne.

“But it’s not just ba🐼sed 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 exp💯eriments there that will hopefully give us a direction that’s good for performance.”