Mercedes explains Hamilton’s ‘struggles’ with F1’s ground-effect cars

Mercedes says Lewis Hamilton struggled to adapt to this current generation of Formula 1 cars and has been “working on how he drives”.

The seven-time F1 world champion ended his 945-day winless run with a victory last time out in the British Grand Prix, giving premise to suggestions he has now got to grips with the ground-effect cars, which returned to F1 in 2022 as part of the new set of regulations.

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Mercedes has been plagued by porpoising and performance problems since the start of the latest F1 era, which left Hamilton uncomfortable and he has been eclipsed by his team-mate George Russell in qualifying.

However, Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin says he believes the team and Hamilton have both now turned a corner.

He said: “George has always set a very high bar in qualifying. And as soon as he was in F1, he was impressing. Even in the Williams, he was doing some pretty impressive qualifying sessions, so we know that he’s very quick.

“Lewis hasn’t disguised the fact that Saturdays were his tough day. He’s struggled with this whole generation of car, really, not suiting his style.

“He’s been working on how he drives. But we had a huge amount of work trying to get the car to be quicker – it just hasn’t been quick enough – but also with a handling balance that the drivers can actually attack the lap on Saturday.

“So we’ve made progress. Recently, George has outqualified Lewis by some fairly fine margins. So it’s great for the team that Lewis is back up there and he’ll be pushing on. But we’ll keep working on that and I’m sure that we’ll see some more Lewis pole positions as well.”

When pressed on what aspect Hamilton was having difficulty with, Shovlin added: “It’s particularly he struggled on the single lap. So his long-run pace is always there. And that’s been really useful. It’s more just the way that he wants to attack a corner. When you do that, then the car would snap to oversteer, you start to build tyre temperature.

“So most of our work has been trying to give him a car that you can drive the very attacking style, extract the lap time out of it without it just sort of breaking away on the way in and catching him by surprise.”