拉塞尔：梅赛德斯“99%”的问题由海豚跳造成

The Briton qualified sixth in Jeddah, behind the four cars of Ferrari and Red Bull, and the Alpine of Esteban Ocon, and finished sixth, having no pace to match the frontrunners.

His teammate Lewis Hamilton qualified only 16th and finished 10th, having taken a different and ultimately less optimal route with the car for qualifying.

Russell noted that a variety of parameters contribute to the porpoising that has affected Mercedes since testing, making it that much harder to resolve.

"There's so many factors at play between the mechanical stiffness of the car and then the stiffness of the floors, the design of the floors, tyre pressures," Russell said.

"Engine mode as well, the faster you go the worse it gets, so it makes it harder for qualifying because we turn the engines up, maximum power, go quicker down the straight which causes more downforce and causes more porpoising.

"So we almost need to pre-empt this issue and also in the race when you have the DRS closed, you have more downforce than you do with the DRS open, and that's another factor we need to consider.

"We're still learning and that's why we're far from optimal. But that's why I said if we solve the porpoising, that would cure I would say 99% of our issues."

Russell admitted that he didn't know how long it would take for the team to get on top of the problem,

"We are going to start trying to develop the car around the issues but we need to solve the underlying problem, which is the porpoising," he said.

"All of these cars perform best at low ride height and we just can't get anywhere close to where our rivals are running. Timeline, to be honest really no idea.

"We definitely got information, we're continuing to learn. At the moment we're making baby steps so we need to make some leaps and bounds, and we're struggling to find that silver bullet to resolve our issues.

"I've got no doubt when we do that, we will find a chunk of lap time, but as I said before it's easier said than done."

在沙特阿拉伯排位赛中，拉塞尔仅次于法拉利、红牛的四位车手，以及Alpine的埃斯特班·奥康排名第六。而他的队友刘易斯·汉密尔顿则由于采用了与之不同且不甚理想的赛车调校，爆冷落到第16位。正赛中，由于在车速上依旧无法与领先车手相抗衡，两人最终以第五和第十位完赛。

拉塞尔指出自测试以来，海豚跳一直困扰着梅赛德斯。然而造成这一问题的因素来自方方面面，因此更难以得到解决。

“在赛车的机械刚度、底板刚度、底板设计和胎压之间有很多因素在起作用，”拉塞尔表示。“还有引擎模式，你跑得越快，情况就越糟。所以排位赛就更难了，因为我们会把引擎调高，让动力最大化，在直道上跑得更快，但这会带来更多的下压力，从而导致更严重的海豚跳。”

“所以我们必须要在这一问题上先发制人，而且在比赛中，当DRS关闭时，会比DRS打开时产生更多的下压力，这是我们需要考虑的另一个因素。我们仍在学习，这就是为什么我们还远未达到最佳状态。但这就是为什么我说，如果我们解决了海豚跳，那么就能解决99%的问题。”

拉塞尔承认，他不知道车队需要多久才能克服这一问题，

“我们将开始围绕这些问题开发赛车，但我们需要解决根本问题，那就是海豚跳，”英国小将表示。“所有这些车在低行驶高度时表现最好，但我们根本无法接近我们的竞争对手。要说时间节点，说实话我真不知道。”。

“我们确实获得了信息，正在继续开展研究。当前，我们迈出了一小步，所以我们需要取得一些飞跃，我们正在努力寻找解决问题的灵丹妙药。我毫不怀疑，当我们做到这一点时，我们的圈速会大幅提升，但就像我之前说的，说起来容易做起来难。”