LEWIS HAMILTON suffered another painful day in his bouncing Mercedes during practice for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, admitting: I’m a bit sore.
The new era of F1 cars has not been kind to Mercedes, with Hamilton and team-mate George Russell struggling on the gruelling Baku street circuit on Friday.
Lewis Hamilton complained or ‘soreness’ after another day in his bouncing Mercedes
Lewis Hamilton and team-mate George Russell have struggled with their cars’ porpoising issue this season
Hamilton ended up 1.650secs adrift of Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and once again bemoaned his car’s porpoising issue.
When asked for the toughest part of his day, the seven-time world champion bluntly replied: “The bouncing.
“I’ll get by, I’m a bit sore. We’re hitting some serious speeds at the end here and it’s bouncing a lot.
“We tried something experimental on my car and it didn’t feel that great, to be honest.
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“But at least we tried it, we’ve got data on it.
“Hopefully for tomorrow we will probably revert back to what we changed.”
Hamilton’s team-mate Russell also moaned about the porpoising issue that has plagued Mercedes all season.
Russell said: “There was a little bit of [bouncing] but it’s just that the cars are running so close to the ground.
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“It’s crazy out there through those high-speed corners, the car’s fully bottoming out… it’s really not comfortable to drive.
“I don’t know what the future holds for this era of cars, but I don’t think it’s right to run like this for the next four years, or whatever we’ve got.”
On Mercedes’ struggles on the Baku street circuit, Russell continued: “It was a tricky day, we weren’t as competitive as we would have liked.
“It’s a tricky track to get the tyres in the right window.
“You see with a number of drivers, their fastest laps were coming right at the end of the run, whereas Ferrari and Red Bull, they seemed to be able to turn it on.
“At the moment, they just have an inherently faster car than us and we’ve done everything we can to try and catch up.
“If we’re totally on top of the tyres we’re not going to fully close that gap – or we’re definitely not going to close that gap, they’re just too far ahead.
“So that’s probably 50 per cent of our issues – the rest is just the lack of performance we have at the moment.”
Hamilton, meanwhile, seemed perplexed by Mercedes’ lack of pace in Azerbaijan.
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He commented: “The tyres feel like they’re working well, no issues for starting a lap.
“I just can’t tell you where 1.6 seconds is, that’s a long way away, although a lot of it is on the straight.”
