Russell: Porpoising solution to bring ‘huge chunk of lap time’

George Russell says Mercedes know that there is a big dose of lap time there to find if they can lower the W13.

Mercedes have somewhat stumbled out of the blocks at the start of this new regulatory era, spending the opening two rounds of the 2022 season as the third-fastest team, comfortably adrift of Ferrari and Red Bull, but with a pace advantage over the midfield in race trim.

Russell believes that much of the W13’s issues relate to its problems with bouncing, also known as porpoising, as the ride height of the car needs to be raised to control this phenomenon.

And with these ground-effect cars, doing this directly results in less downforce and thus poorer performance.

So, once Mercedes find out how to reduce the porpoising without simply raising the ride height, Russell expects to make major gains.

“It’s tricky because we’re putting all of our effort into solving this porpoising issue and it’s not allowing us to focus on other things,” he said, quoted by RaceFans.net.

“As a driver it’s not allowing me to focus on the driving as much. The fine-tuning of the balance, the set-up, we can’t really do because all of our emphasis is on solving this issue. So we’ve got work to do.

“We have the porpoising issue. The only way to run is to raise the car very high. And obviously with this ground effect car we lose all of the downforce.

“So we know that if we can get the car on the ground there is a huge chunk of lap time there. But we can’t achieve at the moment.

“It’s all well and good saying that, but we can’t physically achieve that right now. So we need to have a rethink.”

To that point, Russell made it clear that Mercedes are not very far down that particular road at all, admitting that the porpoising is “exactly the same