Will Mercedes finally find the recipe to solve its serious problems or what can we expect from the German stable in Miami?

What can we expect from Mercedes in Miami? It is very hard to say at the moment, however, the team has come up with a few directions that could help Mercedes to solve the currently serious porpoising problems.

Mercedes is experiencing a very poor start to this season indeed. In fact, it is the worst start to a new year since 2014. Lewis Hamilton has even compared this year’s W13 car to his 2009 McLaren.

So far, the German stable has struggled with major porpoising issues. As a result, Hamilton has often complained about the car’s poor handling, even worse set-up and, last but not least, understeer.

Just how big a problem porpoising can be was demonstrated by George Russell’s words after the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix. In fact, the British driver admitted at the post-race press conference that he was struggling with chest pains and back problems.

Despite the major problems, however, Russell is still in fourth place in the drivers’ championship standings, while Mercedes holds third place among the constructors ahead of fourth-placed McLaren.

In an attempt to solve these problems, the team has found that it has to increase its ground clearance. But it will cost Mercedes another precious tenth of a second, and the average lap time will deteriorate.

This is currently not the route the German stable wants to take, as their qualifying pace is already no match for the top two teams. It should be noted, even McLaren is already closing in on Mercedes in terms of performance.

But Mercedes have no other alternative at the moment, otherwise they won’t be able to move from their position. However, Mercedes engineers are convinced that if they can find a recipe to solve porpoising in the near future and thus be able to lower the ground clearance again, it will immediately unlock a very solid average lap time.

The fact remains, however, that this is a topic that has a lot of variables. According to Motorsport, Mercedes is planning to start testing several updates in Miami anyway.

The team then hopes that the potential upgrade will help them to reduce ground clearance and allow them to get relatively decent lap times. Mercedes boss Toto Wolff even revealed that the Imola race weekend provided the team with some answers as to which direction the engineers should take in order to correct the situation as quickly as possible.

“We have learned as much as we can since we returned from Italy. Our efforts then continued in parallel in the wind tunnel and simulations,” Wolff explained at the press conference, quoted by Motorsport.

“We found several directions we can take that will help us improve the cars. In Miami, we will run some experiments to compare the data from the simulations,” he added.

Sources: Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1, Motorsport