Mercedes Are Confident Their Upgrades Aren’t What Caused Bouncing To Return

Posted on August 7, 2023 | by Charley Williams Car Wars: Return Of The Bouncing ⚔️ It was like a flashback at the Belgian GP, hearing both Mercedes drivers complain about the amount of bouncing they were experiencing in their cars. It had plagued their 2022 season, and we thought the issue had been largely solved – but Spa proved otherwise. Lewis Hamilton and George Russell weren’t too impressed to see their old nemesis make a surprise appearance during the Belgian GP weekend, with Lewis claiming the car “was bouncing like last year”. ???? George had similar complaints, telling the media, including The Race: “We suffered from a huge amount of bouncing today. A number of teams did, maybe not as severe as we did, still, obviously, a bit of a shame to see that as a sport at the pinnacle of motorsport, the majority of teams are still struggling with bouncing.” Many people thought it could be the fault of the team’s new upgrades causing the issue to return, but Mike Elliot, Mercedes chief technical officer, is convinced that isn’t the case. He said: “We definitely had an amount of bouncing [last] weekend, both drivers were telling us that, and we could see it in the data. “We could also see an amount of bouncing on the other cars, and I think some of it is the nature of the circuit at Spa, and in fact, we had huge amounts of bouncing last year, as did most teams. “The question we need to ask ourselves is, how much of it is just the circuit we were at in Spa and how much is to be found in setup because, obviously, it was a wet race weekend, a weekend where we had no dry running up until the point we were actually racing. “We will also take a really good look at the upgrade kit and make that we’ve not introduced bouncing with that, but at the moment, our belief is it is probably a result of setup or the circuit itself.” Fingers crossed we don’t see excessive bouncing again in Zandvoort!