Mercedes have explained why they endured such a difficult qualifying session at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix. Both George Russell and Lewis Hamilton suffered a Q2 exit at Imola, meaning that they will start from 11th and 13th respectively in Saturday's Sprint race. Andrew Shovlin, the team's Trackside Engineering Director, admits that the W13 was affected by an ongoing issue with getting the tyres into the optimum window ahead of a run. "We've struggled with warm-up with this car, to be honest, and we've not got to the bottom of it," Shovlin told media, including RacingNews365.com . "Today was a sort of fairly painful example of that, where we couldn't get the runs in that were long enough to build the temperature to get the tyres in the right window."
Difference between race pace and single lap
Shovlin says that this has been a particular problem for the Silver Arrows in qualifying, rather than having an impact on their race pace. "As I've said, we've seen it [at] all the races," he explained. "[In] Bahrain, it doesn't really cost you, and [at] all the other tracks, it's actually been a bit of a difficulty in qualifying. "Now, race pace has normally been good. I think we've demonstrated that we're third quickest on race pace. The problem is on the single lap that we seem to be very much in the midfield, and it's an area that we are working on that we don't yet fully understand."
Porpoising still an issue for Mercedes
Mercedes are continuing to experience issues with porpoising as well as the problem with warm-up. However, Shovlin believes that it was the latter that caused them trouble in qualifying rather than the bouncing. "To be honest, both of them are annoying issues at the moment," he said. "But realistically, the one that's cost us today is the warm-up, because I think if we'd been able to solve that, we would have had a much more successful time. "The porpoising, it's limiting the car's potential, but that's no different to what we've had in the recent races."
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