'Difficult for Mercedes to be competitive in 2022'

“There is no light at the end of the tunnel”. “Stuck in the middle of the group, a humiliating experience“. Lewis Hamilton and Toto Wolff did not hide their disappointment in a weekend “to forget” for Mercedes so far at Imola. What was supposed to be the track where Mercedes wanted to show the first signs of improvement against porpoising has turned into a nightmare, with the W13 cars eliminated in Q2 while yesterday they remained out of the top-10 again.

Mattia Binotto, Ferrari team principal, was asked about the difficult moment that the Brackley team is going through: “If Mercedes will be able to return to our level in 2022? I honestly see it tough, they don’t have just one single problem and they’re in trouble. Sooner or later they will be competitive again, but for this year it is a very complicated situation” – the Ferrari boss admitted.

With the 14 points won yesterday in the Emilia Romagna GP Sprint race, Red Bull overtook Mercedes (which did not score any points) in the Constructors’ standings, with a total of 69 points against Ferrari’s 116. George Russell lost the second position in the drivers’ standings to Carlos Sainz. Until now, Russell’s ‘consistency’ of performance had at least saved the ranking for Mercedes also due to the reliability problems of the Red Bulls and Carlos Sainz’s error in Australia. The performance of the W13, however, is highly deficient.

At the same time, Mattia Binotto admitted that he does not understand why Mercedes are suffering more than Ferrari due to porpoising. The F1-75 car’s severe bouncing during pre-season testing in Barcelona brought the paddock’s attention to the phenomenon, but Mercedes have encountered much more problems with its effects. Scuderia Ferrari – who start today’s Emilia Romagna GP from second place with Charles Leclerc and fourth place with Carlos Sainz – are also suffering from bouncing themselves, but continue to power through the problem to challenge for regular pole positions and race victories.

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For the Ferrari boss, it remains a mystery as to why Mercedes cannot deal with the porpoising effect, despite the fact that he admits even the F1-75 car could go faster without it: “I don’t know why the others are not as quick as we are with porpoising. But it’s true that we are still suffering with it. We put some actions on the car to try to mitigate it, but it’s not yet addressed and solved. But it’s always a compromise between trying to solve it and giving up some performance, while maybe in the meantime you have to have some porpoising to get the best out of your car.” – Scuderia Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto concluded.