Mercedes toiling on 'fundamental' issues after early season woes ahead of Australian Grand Prix

Stuttgart [Germany], March 19 : Mercedes confessed that they are seeking to resolve "fundamental issues" with its W15 car following a dismal start to the 2024 Formula One season.
Mercedes, who entered the 2024 season hoping to be Red Bull's closest competitors, failed to place a car in the top four in Bahrain or Saudi Arabia, as Max Verstappen and his teammate Sergio Perez won convincing one-two finishes.
Lewis Hamilton, who has been outpaced by teammate George Russell in both races, remarked after placing eighth in Jeddah that "big changes" are still needed beyond the makeover that was supposed to improve their failing cars from the previous two years.
In the team's live race debrief, Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin revealed how testing with the W15 setup throughout practice failed to yield substantial results.
"We started to converge back in the general direction of where we came from arriving there," Shovlin said as quoted by Sky Sports.
"But the learning of it is just that when you change things you can see the differences. So one car making changes, you can see how it performs run to run. We can also look at the global performance of the two cars but fundamentally the limitations that we had in qualifying and the race, they were broadly the same for both," he added.
"So it's telling you it's not a small difference, it's not a tiny bit of camber or a spring or bar here and there. It's something more fundamental that we need to dig into and understand," Shovlin stated.
Following the back-to-back opening races, the season will resume with the Australian Grand Prix on Friday in Melbourne.
Shovlin hopes that having more time to prepare will allow Mercedes to uncover some improvements.
"There's definitely data that we're picking through from Jeddah. We're also looking at data from the Bahrain race, and Bahrain test and we will come up with a plan for how we approach free practice in Melbourne. But it's not just based on what we did in Jeddah. There's a lot of work going on within the aerodynamics department, vehicle dynamics department," he added.
"We're trying to design some experiments there that will hopefully give us a direction that's good for performance," Shovlin said.
One of Mercedes' major issues since F1's regulation revisions for 2022 has been a lack of straight-line speed, but they had one of the fastest cars on the straights in Jeddah.
Shovlin hopes that the team will not have to sacrifice this advancement to restore performance in other areas.
"We were actually one of the fastest cars, if not the fastest car in a straight line. So we were on quite a lot of light wing level. And what we could do is slow ourselves down in sectors two and three to try and recover a bit of that time in sector one. But ideally, we'd like to keep that and work out a way to try and improve sector one by means other than just putting a load more downforce on the car and then paying the price for it on the straights," he said.