Has The Mercedes W14 Still Got Porpoising Issues? F1 Insider Comments

Sky Sports pundit Karun Chandhok has shared footage of Lewis Hamilton taking the W14 out on the Silverstone track, highlighting the evident porpoising.

Mercedes struggled throughout the 2022 season with the dreaded W13 cars. The 2022 contenders were plagued with countless issues, the most memorable being the major porpoising that Lewis Hamilton and George Russell endured at the beginning of the year.

Once the team had been able to get the porpoising under control, it became clear that it had been hiding a host of other issues with the cars. The Brackley-based squad were pleased to put the W13 behind them at the end of the season and team principal and CEO Toto Wolff has been confident that they had put the adjoining issues behind them, too.

Speaking ahead of the 2023 season, Wolff explained that the W14 would look the same but would be completely different underneath and that the team felt confident they would be able to be much more competitive this season.

However, the footage of the seven-time champion in the W14 is reminding too many people of the start of the 2022 season and Chandhok is no different. He captioned the clip:

"Maybe he’s nodding about how good it is"

Maybe he’s nodding about how good it is 🤷🏽‍♂️ https://t.co/aomvlrk7Wb
— Karun Chandhok (@karunchandhok) February 17, 2023

Fans still remain hopeful that the W14 will have better performance than its predecessor. Some argue that the team could be "sand-bagging", meaning they want to hide the true performance of the car to make other teams think they won't be one to look out for.

Truth be told, we can't be sure whether the W14 is porpoising or not. It looks as though the car hit a bump which induced a bit of wobble, but from our eyes here at F1B, it doesn't look as though this was actually porpoising, more just the wobble of the suspension as the car traverses a bumpy part of the tarmac.

Only time will tell. However, we don't need to wait too long as the teams will take their 2023 contenders on track for the pre-season testing on 23 - 25 February in Bahrain and then again for the first race weekend of the season the week after on 3 -5 March.