In the round-up: Mercedes are aiming to bring an upgrade to next week’s Miami Grand Prix which will help address the serious porpoising problems they have encountered since the season began.
In brief
Mercedes “seeing encouraging signs” of car fixMercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin says the team hopes to begin addressing its porpoising problem with upgrades from the next race.
The team has been forced to compromise its set-ups because of the extreme bouncing its cars have experienced over the opening races. “We can’t run the car where we designed it to be run,” said Shovlin in a video released by the team. “We’re having to run higher ride heights and by running higher ride heights, it’s got less performance.”
Shovlin said they have focused on trying “to find “an aerodynamic solution that we can apply to the car that will make this problem go away.”
“Being realistic we think this will be something we approach in steps rather than one big moment where the whole thing vanishes,” he added, “but we are seeing encouraging signs as I said we are hoping to bring parts to the car soon, maybe even Miami where we can hopefully see progress on this issue.”
Hawkins: “It wasn’t like that 10 or 15 years ago, unfortunately”
Jessica Hawkins, who splits a role as driver ambassador to the Aston Martin F1 team with racing in W Series and in British TCR, told RaceFans that she thought her early karting achievements would have attracted more attention in 2022 than they did in the 2000s.
“I sometimes think obviously, females now are hot property and if there’s a fast one they get snapped up,” Hawkins said. “And I think had I achieved what I achieved, but 10 or 15 years later, I genuinely think it might be a different story.
‘I was British [karting] champion at a very young age, won loads of stuff in Europe in my teenage years. And had that been the case now, I think there would be people trying to get me to sign for…