Mercedes has brought a series of updates for the W13 car to Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya for this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix in hopes of easing the porpoising problem that has plagued Hamilton and team-mate George Russell this year.
Mercedes showed signs of improving their relative pace against Red Bull and Ferrari through testing, and briefly led the timesheets in Q2 as their rivals opted to complete their opening runs on used tyres.
Russell qualified fourth, beating Sergio Perez in the Red Bull, while Hamilton finished the session sixth, 0.762 seconds off Charles Leclerc’s pole position time.
Although Hamilton noted after qualifying that he was “in the same position I was in the last race”, he was optimistic about the progress Mercedes was making to alleviate the porpoising problem.
“We don’t have the straight-line rebound, which is a huge, huge difference,” Hamilton said.
“But we still have some rebounds like Turn 3 and Turn 9. So we still have some improvements to make, but the car is much better.”
Hamilton added: “You see in Q2 we were the fastest. So it’s a beacon of hope for the team.
Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W13
Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images
Hamilton sits sixth in the Drivers’ Championship after five races, 68 points behind leader Leclerc to leave any hope of challenging for a record eighth world title this year in serious doubt.
Asked if the step forward at Barcelona has given him some hope that he could get back into title contention this year, Hamilton replied: “I’m not really focusing on that, I am still far away.
“My teammate is fourth, so that means the car should be at least third or fourth, and I’m sixth. So I still have trouble with the car.
“I don’t know how to get around this, I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m going to keep trying to work hard on myself.”
Russell agreed with Hamilton’s assessment that porpoising remained a problem in the corners, but said the car could now drive closer to the ground than before.
“In the corners themselves it wasn’t fundamentally different, just we had more grip and we could get the car closer to the ground and we know that would come with resolving porpoising,” Russell said.
“But I think we lost a lot of overall downforce to be able to do that, and the car is probably not as fast as we would like at the moment to fight with the guys up front.
“Now we know that’s our baseline, we can really build on that and find a lot more performance.”
Russell added he was “confident” the updates put Mercedes “much more in the mix” against Ferrari and Red Bull, who swept the first five races of the season.
“We just have to look today, it was not an optimal day and yet we still had our best result as a team,” Russell said.
“We were always there in the top three, top four usually all weekend, and it was the first time in the whole weekend that we were top of the timesheet in a qualifying session. “Russell said.
“It’s been an easier weekend for us and we’re excited to see what the races ahead have in store for us. It will take a few more races until we really find a lot more rhythm.
