Let's talk about McLaren.....

Was the McLaren also visibly suffering from porpoising? The big question for me is how good is the Mercedes PU? Apart from Williams posting in the mid-field all the Mercedes teams Qualifying top speeds was found on the bottom of the list I saw, just broken up by the two Alfa Romeo. Now I know those had a porpoising problem, as well as Mercedes, so those top speeds suffered from that for sure. So how was McLaren and Aston Martin doing there? If most of the Mercedes teams are in the porpoise camp Williams gives hope, if not and Williams just sought help in a more extreme low downforce setup then Mercedes might've lost a lot of ground due to the new fuel and sorting out last seasons reliability issues.

But for McLaren that's not the only problem so far, they lost ground compared to Williams and Aston Martin as well, but hopefully for them they 'just' haven't found the right screws to make the car work in Bahrain and it can be sorted out, and not something designed into the very basis.

It's yet far from all lost. If it's porpoising, or their solution being still running relatively high and sealing the gap by vortex generation and that not working as well as the ones by other teams, then a lot of pace can be gained relatively quickly by coming up with a better solution.

Yes, in the practice events McLaren was one of the first teams looking good on porpoising, but their solution raised the car rather high above the track. That's normally very bad for a venturi tunnel, lowering the generated downforce significantly and this with those new cars relying heavily on that downforce. McLaren tried to cure that with generating air vortices with the sideskirt supposed to seal of that huge gap from air flowing inwards. Perhaps that didn't work that well.


The picture doesn't look good for the Mercedes engine, but the fastest top speed from Mercedes teams was the Williams. So maybe it's the cars of the other 3 requiring more drag inducing help to sort out their problems and the engine, while I highly doubt it's the best any more, isn't down on power as much as the first race makes believe.