Mercedes: Constantly doing analysis on our power unit

The problem that the World Champions face, is that the power units are now frozen until 2026, when a new generation of units will be introduced, and having an underpowered unit that cannot be developed any further - unless for reliability concerns - isn't good new for the team.

Neither Mercedes, nor their customer teams seem to be enjoying the grunt they use to in previous years, which raised the questions about the state of performance of the 2022 power units.

"Well, we're constantly doing analysis on that," Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes' trackside engineering director - told the media, with reference to the team's current power unit/

"There are areas that we think we can improve in terms of managing the deployment," he added.

"However, it's a homologated unit now, so you can only do things for reliability," Shovlin explained. [But] that doesn't stop us looking at what we can do within the modes and how we can use those better, whether there is anything more we can gain in how we're deploying the modes that are available."

However, Shovlin admitted that Mercedes' units are not powerful enough, saying: "But we're not quick enough and, when you're not quick enough, you look at all areas for improvement.

"So the remit of the power unit people is to focus on that and look at any fine-tuning that we can do to find gains," he revealed.

"And, on the chassis side, we've got a lot of different projects at the moment to try and move forward," the director pointed out.

Mercedes had some minor upgrades at Imola, which Shovlin denied were to sort out the "porpoising", as he said: "This was normal aero development.

"To be honest, we're working on the issues we've got with bouncing separately.

"The developments we brought here, we were aware that they're not going to affect that," Shovlin went on. "So that was why we were focused on those parts.

"But, as an aside, we're still working hard to try and understand and get on top of the bouncing, as well as the [tyre] warm-up.

"That's another area that's a weakness of this car that we need to fix before we'll be competitive," Shovlin said.

Mercedes has since announced that a major upgrade package for their W13 will be introduced in Miami.