Mercedes has not had any porpoising problems during the opening hours of pre-season testing from Bahrain, says team boss Toto Wolff.
Last year, the Brackley-based squad suffered severe bouncing along the straights in the early part of the season.
The issue trickled out as the year wore on and the FIA has implemented technical issues to stamp out the problem for the 2023 season, which includes raising the floor edges and diffuser throat height, as well as stiffening the diffuser edge.
George Russell debuted the W14 in Bahrain on Thursday morning and tallied 69 laps, which Wolff says was without the annoyance of bouncing.
“It seems to be balanced in the right way,” said Wolff. “There’s no bouncing, which is good news apart from the big bump at the end of the straight.
“It’s a good starting point. We are gathering a lot of data because that was important to correlate obviously after last year, and trying different things.
“We haven’t seen any bouncing. We had a little bit of movement in Turn 12, the faster one.
“But it is not anywhere close to the degree that we had last year, and at this stage not performance limiting.”
Wolff says that the opening day of running contrasts greatly to the situation Mercedes found itself in 12 months ago.
“We knew that we were in trouble because the car was just bouncing around,” he said. “And we really weren’t able to drive it correctly. So, that is very different.
“I think we have a solid base now to work from and try to optimise the car, which we haven’t done yet.
“It’s really just finding out, are there any areas that could be real performance hindrances like last year with the bouncing? Now we just got to work through the programme.”
Ferrari, meanwhile, appeared to have some bouncing through Carlos Sainz’s car during the morning session.
However, team boss Frederic Vasseur has cooled the situation: “It’s not at all as it was one year ago with the car bouncing like a kangaroo.
“Today we have some parts of the track – before Turn 1, and Turn 12 – it’s a bit more bumpy than it was before. But it’s a different issue.”
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