After Lewis Hamilt𓃲on and George Russell finished third and fourth in the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix, Mercedes’ technical chief James Allison💞 said the team hoped to get on top of the aerodynamic issues it is facing within ‘two or three’ races. 

Mercedes trialed different set-up and rear wing configurations on both W13 cars during the two 60 minute practic♉e sessions on Friday in a bid to improve the situation, but the experiments did not fully address the problem.

“We tried a few ꦜmore experiments to understand the bouncing issue here, some which made it worse, some which helped, but we don't yet have a solution to m▨ake the problem go away,” Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin explained. 

“We can reduce this slightly for [Saturday] as it's affecting tꦚhe drivers in a few of the corners and costing time.

“Compared to Bahrain, the car balance is in a better place and in terms of♔ degradation we're quite happy with what we have seen.

“Our single lap still needs a bit of work but we've got the session tomorrow to do that. Overall though, a reasonable day but clearly we still have a bit of w🌄ork to do before we'll be troubling Red Bull or Ferrari.”

Hamilton admitted the team still has “many of the same problems” it 🍌faced in Bahrain and stressed Mercedes is still lacking straight-line speed𓆏. 

“We sti🔜ll have many ofꦜ the same problems we had in the last race but we're working through them,” Hamilton said. 

“It’s definitely a little bit harder here with the high-💫speed corners but the grip is really good on the track and we just need to find some speed on the straights.