Mercedes happy with margin: 'Gives us some breathing space to experiment'

At the Mercedes factory, the team is working hard to find solutions to the problems with the W13. At the Saudi Arabia Grand Prix, George Russell drove to P5 in no man's land, while Lewis Hamilton managed only one point.

The gap towards the Ferrari's and the Red Bulls appeared to be even bigger in Jeddah than in Bahrain, where Hamilton managed a podium finish two weeks ago. In the new episode of the F1 Race Debrief engineer Andrew Shovlin explains that the gap towards the midfield allows the team to experiment with the W13.

"We’ve got quite a lot to find in both qualifying and on long run if we want to challenge the Ferrari en the Red Bull cars. However, behind us, it looks like we have a bit of a margin to that midfield. That buys us a bit of breathing space to allow us to experiment on the weekends, to try and bring solutions to lift the level of performance of the car", Shovlin says in the video.

Mercedes wants to compete again

For Hamilton, however, the experimentation backfired last weekend when he failed to get beyond Q1 with a poor set-up. The porpoising problem has not been solved yet either, as the Mercedes bounced around the track again in Jeddah. For now, the team will try to limit the damage.

"Everyone is working very hard to try and understand the issue and bring solutions, and we are going to be doing that in a phased way over the next few races. At the track, we are going to be doing as much as we can to minimize damage, to score as many points as possible. The bigger par of this is trying to get back to a level where we can compete for pole positions and for race wins", continues the Mercedes engineer.