Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin explained the biggest issue the W15 is facing right now is a lack of grip and balance.
Mercedes seemed to be struggling compared to Ferrari and Red Bull in the first two races of the season. Shovlin admitted that there are “a few things” that the Brackley-based outfit needs to fix.
“It’s a few things. One of them was that the balance wasn’t great,” Shovlin explained.
“So in those very fast corners, the walls aren’t particularly far away, it is where the driver wants a lot of confidence, and quite often we were snapping to oversteer if they really leaned on the tires.
“You can easily imagine how unsettling that is for the drivers, and it was a factor in qualifying and the race, and in qualifying, we were also suffering with bouncing.
“It was less of a problem in the race, there is more fuel in the car, you’re going a bit slower, and it seemed to calm down and wasn’t such an issue.”
The Mercedes engineer continued by saying that the team is working hard to fix the car’s issues ahead of Melbourne.
“But the big [issue] is that we don’t really have enough grip, so that is one of things we are working hard on this week because Melbourne has a similar nature of corners.
“We are doing a lot of work to try and understand why we did not seem to have the grip of some of our close competitors.”
Shovlin concluded by saying that Mercedes decided to run with low wing levels in Jeddah to be faster on the straights, but that meant struggling more in Sector 1.
“In that sector [Sector 1], [we were losing] around three or four-tenths, but the other thing to consider is that we were actually one of the fastest cars if not the fastest car in a straight line.
“We were quite light on wing level, and what we could do is slow ourselves down in Sector 2 or 3 and try to recover a bit of that time in Sector 1.
“But ideally we’d like to keep that and work out a way to try and improve Sector 1 by other means than just putting a load more downforce on the car and then paying for the price for it on the straights.”