Mercedes believe it has a fundamental issue to resolve that is causing its drivers to struggle with the balance of the car, after an inconsistent start to the Formula 1 season.

Both George Russell and Lewis Hamilton have looked quick at times during practice sessions but faded as the race weekends have reached their competitive stage, with Russell finishing sixth and Hamilton ninth in Saudi Arabia. Trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin says the different setups the two drivers ran in Jeddah enable the team to understand where the car is lacking at present, and work to try and find potential fixes by next weekend’s Australian Grand Prix is ongoing.

“The learning of it is just that when you change things, you can see the differences,” Shovlin said. “So one car making changes, you can see how it performs run to run. We can also look at the global performance of the two cars, but fundamentally the limitations that we had in qualifying and the race, they were broadly the same for both.

“So it’s telling you it’s not a small difference — it’s not a tiny bit of camber or a spring or bar here and there. It’s something more fundamental that we need to dig into and understand.

“There’s definitely data that we’re picking through from Jeddah. We’re also looking at data from the Bahrain race, Bahrain test and we will come up with a plan for how we approach free practice in Melbourne.

“But it’s not just based on what we did in Jeddah. There’s a lot of work going on within the aerodynamics department, vehicle dynamics department. We’re trying to design some experiments there that will hopefully give us a direction that’s good for performance.”

When analyzing where Mercedes faced a deficit compared to the likes of McLaren, Aston Martin and Ferrari at the last race, Shovlin says even a better balance wouldn’t have made up for the total difference.

“It’s a few things. One of them was the balance wasn’t great,” he noted. “Those very fast corners, the walls aren’t particularly far away, so are the ones 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. Now, that was a factor in a qualifying and the race.

“In qualifying we were also suffering a bit with the bouncing. That was less of a problem in the race — there’s more fuel on the car, you’re going a bit slower. And that seemed to calm down and wasn’t such an issue.

“The big one is we don’t really have enough grip [in high-speed corners]. So that’s one of the things that we are working hard on this week because Melbourne has similar nature of corners. We’re doing a lot of work to try and understand why we did not seem to have the grip of some of our close competitors.”