Mercedes: Our belief bouncing is a result of setup or the circuit

That is the claim of Mercedes' Chief Technical Officer Mike Elliott in the team post Belgian Grand Prix race debrief on the team's YouTube channel.

The eight time Formula 1 Constructors' Champions brought a major upgrade package to their W14, but the weather did not allow them to do any dry running, and that may have caused a wrong setup direction for the car on the weekend at Spa which in turn made the dreaded bouncing, which the team suffered from in 2022, return.

Toto Wolff said after the race that they need to investigate whether the new upgrade caused the booking, but Elliott seemed to rule out that possibility.

Elliott said in Mercedes' debrief: "We definitely had an amount of bouncing [last] weekend, both drivers were telling us that and we could see it in the data.

"We could also see an amount of bouncing on the other cars and I think some of it is the nature of the circuit at Spa and in fact we had huge amounts of bouncing last year as did most teams.

"In terms of the performance, it definitely affects the performance of the cars because it affects the drivers' ability to extract the maximum grip from the car, it affects their balance and it affects their ability to get their braking points right. So that is something we will be working on for the future," he explained.

"The question we need to ask ourselves is, how much of it is just the circuit we were at in Spa and how much is to be found in setup because obviously it was a wet race weekend, a weekend where we had no dry running up until the point we were actually racing.

"We will also take a really good look at the upgrade kit and make sure that we've not introduced bouncing with that but at the moment our belief is it is probably a result of setup or the circuit itself," the Mercedes engineer maintained.

Elliott went on to say that Mercedes will keep adding upgrades to the W14 as the season progresses following the summer break, as that will be crucial for the development of their 2024 car.

"In terms of what we can expect from the second half of the season we need to keep pushing," he said.

"We need to keep pushing because we want to learn more about this car so we can take that into the winter and into the development of next year's car but also we want that fight for second in the championship so we will keep bringing some upgrades to the car, keep fighting for that second position," Elliott concluded.

Mercedes are currently second in the 2023 F1 Constructors' Championship, 256 points behind leaders Red Bull and 51 points ahead of Aston Martin who are third.