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Mercedes reveals areas of investigation for F1 car bouncing

Mercedes Formula 1 chief technical officer Mike Elliott admits the team still hasn’t got to the bottom of the bouncing issue that affected its cars at the Belgian Grand Prix.

The phenomenon that dominated the team’s 2022 season has largely disappeared with this year’s W14, helped by regulation tweaks over the winter.

But both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell reported the problem at Spa, with the latter noting that he experienced a “huge amount”.

Elliott says the team will have to determine whether it was track specific or related to set-up, given that under the sprint event rules Mercedes and its F1 rivals only had the wet FP1 session in which to hone its cars, and no changes were possible after that.

The other possibility is that recent car updates have had an impact, although Elliott believes that’s a less likely cause.

“We definitely had an amount of bouncing this weekend,” he said in a team video. “Both drivers were telling us that and we could see it in the data.

“We could also see an amount of bouncing on the other cars and I think some of it is the nature of the circuit at Spa, and in fact we had huge amounts of bouncing last year as did most teams.

“In terms of the performance, it definitely affects the performance of the cars because it affects the drivers’ ability to extract the maximum grip from the car, it affects their balance and it affects their ability to get their braking points right.”

Source: Autosport

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