Brundle highlights 'very worrying' Mercedes problem

Ex-Formula 1 driver Martin Brundle has highlighted a “very worrying” problem that has been consistently apparent in recent seasons.

Mercedes is once again enduring a difficult start to an F1 season as it continues to struggle with the current ground effect cars.

The Brackley-based squad slipped back in the pecking order in 2022 when the new regulations were introduced and has taken just a single grand prix in that period.

Mercedes has highlighted that correlation issues have stinted its progress across the last handful of years.

“They've got to understand this car and I think that's a grave concern for all of the people there," Brundle told the Sky Sports F1 podcast.

"There's a lot of very clever people, with a huge amount of resource, performance tools and budget.

“I'm not going to try and second guess what's wrong with it, or state what I think is wrong with it, because if they don't know, then I certainly don't know."

Mercedes has endured a difficult opening four rounds to the campaign and currently sits fourth in the Constructors' Championship, just one point ahead of customer team Aston Martin.

Brundle stated that the factory data not transferring over to the on-track product makes for a concerning situation at Mercedes.

"They cannot get a handle on these ground-effect cars,” he said. “This is the third season of these regulations.

“They turn up, they think they have aced it, a lot of positive noises, and then it still bounces a little bit with the porpoising.

"But their problem is, from time to time, the thing performs beautifully and they are really quite fast in phases. But they can't seem to reproduce that session to session, let alone day to day, let alone grand prix to grand prix.

"This is the problem they have got - this knife edge of a car that sometimes looks like they have finally sorted it and more of the time they just can't understand it.

"When you've got that, when all of your tools and all your clever people don't correlate with the stopwatch and the performance of other cars on the track, and you can't seem to nail it down, then that's really frustrating and I would say very worrying."