Russell broke F1 floor stay due to Mercedes porpoising in Imola FP1

The Mercedes motorsport boss also revealed the bouncing was so bad around Imola that his drivers were unable to traverse the main straight without lifting off before the Tamburello chicane braking zone, but he said problems with tyre warm-up were behind the Silver Arrows’ massive gap to Ferrari in FP1.

Russell’s car was spotted porpoising heavily as he approached Tamburello during the Friday afternoon practice running – the W13 bouncing so hard that sparks flew from it each time it hit the ground.

Speaking to Sky Sports F1 after FP1 had finished, Wolff said “we had George bouncing so much that he actually broke the stay on the floor”.

He added: “You can’t drive [down the main straight] – you have to lift on the straight.”

Mercedes fitted the metal floor stays to the W13 for the first time at the end of Barcelona testing, which it topped before introducing a drastically different design for the following second test in Bahrain that has so far been off the ultimate pace.

At the time in Spain these parts were not allowed by the regulations, but the FIA subsequently allowed their inclusion to designs. The stays attempt to stiffen the floors that are flexing and stalling at top speed, which leads to porpoising.

Wolff said of Russell and Lewis Hamilton’s Imola-specific experience so far with porpoising, which has also forced them to back off and lose lap time at the other circuits F1 has visited so far in 2022, that: “They are trained – I have never experienced bouncing like this in my life.

“But it’s clearly not drivable.”

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Both Mercedes struggled in FP1, the only practice session before qualifying later on Friday

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

The championship-leading Ferrari squad is another team that is still encountering severe porpoising after the issue first appeared in the various private team shakedown sessions that preceded winter testing, but unlike Mercedes the Scuderia is not losing pace as a result of having to make set-up changes and can seemingly cope with the bouncing, even if it appears almost comically bad on the red cars at times.

“Their porpoising looks a little bit different to ours,” Wolff assessed. “Our frequency looks higher and the main difference is that when they hit the brakes, their car stabilises – ours [does] not.”

Russell finished almost five seconds slower than pacesetter Charles Leclerc in FP1, with Hamilton another two seconds further back from the Ferrari driver and the pair down in 10th and 18th respectively.

But Wolff reckons the large gaps to the championship leader in practice were “all about getting grip into the tyre [with] temperature”.

He added: “The Ferraris seemed to unlock that, everybody else is pretty much all over the place.

“Feedback that we are getting from Lewis and George is that there’s literally zero grip and that these gaps point to the tyres.

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“When you are able to unlock that issue, you will do a jump and where that will end, I don’t know.

“I think there will be quite some discrepancies in performance and you could see a team [really behind in qualifying later on Friday].

“We were five second off the pace – it’s not the car and not the driver.”

Regarding the gap between the Mercedes cars in FP1 – where Hamilton in particular struggled for grip on the intermediate tyre – Wolff said there were no significant set up differences between the two W13s, other than “a little bit of a difference in rear wings” and “just different tyre pressures”.