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Andrew Shovlin says such is Mercedes’ porpoising problem that the team has no idea if their W13 is actually a fast car or not.

Adopting ground effect aerodynamics this season, almost all of the teams have suffered with porpoising to some degree.

Porpoising is the result of downforce pushing the car down onto the track which causes the underfloor aero to stall, and as that happens the car rises off from the track leading to the underfloor aero kicking in. The car is then pushed back into the ground and so it continues.

That leads to a bouncing motion along the straight with the Mercedes W13 seemingly suffering more than its rivals.

So much so that Shovlin, Mercedes’ head of trackside engineering, says they don’t know if they have a good car in the W13 or not, and they are unlikely to know until they fix the bouncing.

He told Motorsport.com: “That’s probably priority number one because that’s ultimately preventing us from running the car where we’d like to run it for optimum performance.

“What we don’t know is, if we could just magically make that issue vanish, where would we actually be in terms of car pace: is the car fast enough or not? And it’s very difficult to answer that question.”

Mercedes have had to raise the ride-height of the car to