‘A grave concern’ - Mercedes’ F1 2024 car correlation issues branded “very worrying”

Mercedes’ ongoing correlation issues with their 2024 F1 car are “very worrying” and “a grave concern”, according to Martin Brundle.

The eight time constructors’ world champions endured another disappointing race at the Japanese Grand Prix as George Russell finished seventh, two places ahead of teammate Lewis Hamilton in ninth.

Despite making wholesale concept changes for 2024 after a difficult couple of seasons, the W15 has been dogged by ongoing troubles, with Mercedes boss Toto Wolff admitting that the team’s wind tunnel data is not correlating with on-track performance.

“They've got to understand this car and I think that's a grave concern for all of the people there," ex-F1 driver Brundle said on the Sky Sports F1 podcast.

"There's a lot of very clever people, with a huge amount of resource, performance tools and budget. I'm not going to try and second guess what's wrong with it, or state what I think is wrong with it, because if they don't know, then I certainly don't know.

“They cannot get a handle on these ground-effect cars. This is the third season of these regulations. They turn up, they think they have aced it, a lot of positive noises, and then it still bounces a little bit with the porpoising.

"But their problem is, from time to time, the thing performs beautifully and they are really quite fast in phases. But, they can't seem to reproduce that session to session, let alone day to day, let alone Grand Prix to Grand Prix.

"This is the problem they have got - this knife edge of a car that sometimes looks like they have finally sorted it and more of the time they just can't understand it.

"When you've got that, when all of your tools and all your clever people don't correlate with the stopwatch and the performance of other cars on the track, and you can't seem to nail it down, then that's really frustrating and I would say very worrying.”

After four races Mercedes sit fourth in the constructors’ championship behind Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren, and are already 107 points adrift of the reigning world champions.