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Lewis Hamilton finished a disappointing seventh and ninth in the two free practice sessions in Bahrain. Mercedes never looked as comfortable to drive as the Red Bull or Ferrari as Lewis suffered from extreme porpoising down the straights. This phenomenon had former F1 world champion Damon Hill worried.
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Talking to SkyF1 at the end of the day, Hill said:
"Possibly they've done a big set-up change, which is why they were late getting out, but it didn't work. You could see from the onboard camera [Hamilton] was getting a proper shaking around. Whether he can actually see is one question!"
He added:
"As the speed increases, the oscillation gets greater. You get the occasional bump, but this is ridiculous. That is just out of control stalling and releasing."
Lewis Hamilton's teammate didn't face such extreme issues
Looking at the timesheets, it was obvious to see that Lewis Hamilton's teammate fared much better as he finished fourth in both the sessions. According to Damon Hill, this can also be explained by the fact that Russell did not seem to suffer as much from porpoising as Lewis did during the day.
"George didn't look so bad – he didn't seem to have the same degree of problem. [Mercedes] will be comparing set-ups, perhaps it's a set-up thing, perhaps it's something else. I mean, if you've got the same set-up and then one car is doing it and the other car's not, you've got a real problem!"
From the outside, it does appear that Mercedes is not entirely comfortable with the way the car is behaving right now. The team has implemented a radical "no-sidepod" design that is completely different from anything on the grid. While it was initially touted to be one of the better designs in the paddock, things have unraveled poorly for the German team.
The car was more than half a second slower than Red Bull and Ferrari during the long runs and it does appear that they need to do a lot of work to bring the car back into contention at the front of the grid.
