Mercedes does not think porpoising at Spa is due to recent updates

There it suddenly was again in the Belgian Grand Prix: porpoising. Mercedes suffered greatly from it and saw performance lost due to the bouncing of the W14s. Team boss Toto Wolff was bitter as hell, but there was no explanation immediately after the race. Mike Elliott takes a closer look at the issue a few days after the last one before the summer break.

In the German formation's Race Debrief, the technical chief says that the bouncing of the car was well reflected in the telemetry. "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."

Where does it lie?

The coming week will see a close look at the data to ensure that problem does not return in the second half of the season. "The question we need to ask ourselves is, how much of it is just the circuit we were at in Spa and how much is to be found in setup because obviously it was a wet race weekend, a weekend where we had no dry running up until the point we were actually racing", he said.

The recently made improvements to the W14 will also be scrutinised to make sure Mercedes has not gone down the wrong path. Elliott: "We will also take a really good look at the upgrade kit and make sure that we’ve not introduced bouncing with that but at the moment our belief is it is probably a result of setup or the circuit itself."