After lurching to disappointing results in practice sessions Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton and George Russell completed a turnaround qualifying P5 and P6 for Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix. PHOTO: Mercedesamgf1

BRENDAN LINES APRIL 10, 2022

A SHOCK podium would be nothing short of a miracle to save Mercedes’ season on Sunday at Albert Park, well off its usual class-of-the-field performance, the team has been taming a hard-to-handle ‘rattlesnake’ car Lewis Hamilton says.

Both Hamilton and Russell have been quite vocal since Bahrain on the W13’s lack of performance.

Hamilton’s frustrations boiled over on Friday claiming  “nothing” was working despite the team’s best efforts to improve the underperforming W13.

Porpoising and tyre temperature compounding a deficient power unit added up to a series of headaches on Friday night back at the team’s base in Brackley.

But Saturday’s Q3 effort, coming off a long run of two out-laps while towing teammate George Russell, the seven-time world champion and part-time snake charmer almost put the car on the second row of the grid.

“It’s like a rattlesnake!,” Hamilton said.

“If the ride height is going high/low, high/low, when you turn in you never know which position you’ll catch it in and the car could oversteer or understeer depending where you catch it, so driving it is a real challenge.”

Team principal Toto Wolff said the team had overperformed when Hamilton and Russell eventually finished in P5 and P6 respectively – helped partially by Fernando Alonso’s crashing out in Q3.

But just what will Hamilton and Russell need to do to pull off an unlikely podium finish at Albert Park? Wolff suggests tyres again will be a factor.

“Protecting the tyres will be important, and nobody has had the opportunity to gather much data after the red flag yesterday in FP2,” Wolff said.

“So it will be another trip into the unknown – and hopefully we have made the right choices to deliver our performance across the full race distance.” 

While the gaps to Red Bull and Ferrari of a are sizeable concern, Mercedes hopes if it can fall on the good side of tyre degradation its chances could be realistic. 

Slightly helped by Alonso and Carlos Sainz’s misfortunes on Saturday George Russell believed “there’s no reason why we can’t finish ahead of the McLaren tomorrow, we have to try and also keep Sainz and Alonso behind”.