George Russell expands on issue causing '99%' of Mercedes' problems

George Russell says that Mercedes are about a second a lap off of their competitors in race-trim and that porpoising is causing 99% of their issues.

Another tricky weekend for the Silver Arrows has passed with the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix seeing Lewis Hamilton only managing 10th.

Russell had a better time of things, with him finishing 5th, but it is clear that they are not where they want to be, with Red Bull and Ferrari quite far down the road in terms of their respective cars.

Russell did see some positives over the weekend in his W13, meanwhile, but admits that porpoising is still causing serious headaches within the team:

“The car felt good, honestly. We maximised the balance, we know what we’re lacking and that’s downforce.

“Pushing flat out, I was really pleased with the performance from my personal side. It was really managed and I did my best to keep up with the Red Bulls, especially after the restart.

“But we’re a second behind them, generally, and we’ve got work to do. We have a better handle of the race pace than the quali pace, but the inherent issues are still there.

“When I look at the result we finished 30 seconds behind – I think there were 30 laps after the safety car – so that’s how far behind we are.

“We’re continuing to learn but at the moment we’re making baby steps and we need to make leaps and bounds.

“We’re struggling to find the silver bullet to resolve our issues. I’ve no doubt when we do that, we’ll find a chunk of lap time, but it’s easier said than done.

“We are trying to develop the car around the issues, but we need to solve the underlying problem which is the porpoising.

“There are so many factors at play when we’re balancing it. We change the setup and we think it’ll improve, and