‘Disaster’: Lewis Hamilton says his Mercedes car is only ‘getting worse’

Lewis Hamilton’s car has been a nightmare all season and it seems it’s only getting harder for him to drive his Mercedes pain free.

MONTREAL, QUEBEC - JUNE 17: Lewis Hamilton of Great Britain and Mercedes talks to the media in the Paddock prior to practice ahead of the F1 Grand Prix of Canada at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve on June 17, 2022 in Montreal, Quebec. Clive Rose/Getty Images/AFP == FOR NEWSPAPERS, INTERNET, TELCOS & TELEVISION USE ONLY ==

Lewis Hamilton said his Mercedes car “is getting worse” as he labelled his practice for the Canadian Grand Prix “a disaster”.

The seven-time world champion’s season has been plagued by rapid bouncing, known as “porpoising”, and Mercedes experimented with a different set up in practice at Montreal, but it clearly wasn’t working.

Hamilton was eighth in P1 and 13th in P2, but was again off the pace of teammate George Russell, who was sixth and seventh in both sessions.

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Hamilton told team radio the car was “undriveable” and later explained the full extent of the challenge facing him.

“Pretty much like every Friday for us, trying lots of different things, an experimental floor on my side which didn’t work,” he said.

“Nothing we do generally to this car seems to work so we’re trying different set-ups.

“Me and George (Russell) went with much different set-ups in this P2 just to see if one way works and one way doesn’t. I’ll wait to hear how it felt for him but for me it was a disaster.

“It’s like the car’s getting worse, it’s getting more and more unhappy the more we do to it. I don’t know, we’ll keep working on it, it is what it is. I think this is the car for the year, so we’ll just have to tough it out, and work hard on building a better car for next year.”

Hamilton said his Mercedes W13 is so hard to drive it is a constant battle to prevent himself from crashing out.

“It’s just a monumental fight the whole time to keep it out of the wall,” he said.

“When it bounces, when the car leaves the ground a lot, and then when it lands it grips up and it goes in different directions, and you’re just trying to catch a car that jumps, hops, grips, hops, grips.

Lewis Hamilton is not a happy customer at the moment. (Photo by Geoff Robins / AFP)

“It’s tough, it keeps you on edge. And there were some big hits today. We’ve raised the car but it doesn’t make a difference.

“We’ve tried loads and loads of things, we’ve ticked them all of.

“Those ones don’t work, so we have to go and find something else. And we’re way off, but it’s to be expected with this car.”

The brutal toll the porpoising was taking on Hamilton was clear for all to see after last weekend’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix, where he fought through pain to finish a respectable fourth.

The 37-year-old struggled to get out of his car under his own steam after the race and has spent all week in rehab to get his body right for the race in Canada.

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff apologised to Hamilton and described the car as a “s***box” after the race.

Hamilton revealed he has been suffering from headaches in recent months as a result of the bouncing effect on his car.

“There’s a lot more bruising after the races nowadays so it’s taking you most of the week generally to recover,” he said.

“I don’t think that generally has anything to do with age. It’s just because the bruising can be quite severe.

“When you’re experiencing 10Gs on the bounce on a bump, which is what I experienced in the last race, that’s a heavy, heavy load on the lower part and the top part of your neck.

“In terms of micro concussions, I’ve definitely been having a lot more headaches in the past months, but I’ve not seen a specialist about it.

Hamilton’s nightmare is a nightmare to drive. (Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images)

“I’m not taking it too seriously; I’ve just been taking some painkillers.”

The FIA, F1’s governing body, has introduced a rare mid-season technical directive in an effort to reduce the porpoising in the interests of safety.

A statement from the FIA read: “A Technical Directive has been issued to give guidance to the teams about the measures the FIA intends to take to tackle the problem. These include:

“1. Closer scrutiny of the planks and skids, both in terms of their design and the observed wear.

“2. The definition of a metric, based on the car’s vertical acceleration, that will give a quantitative limit for acceptable level of vertical oscillations. The exact mathematical formula for this metric is still being analysed by the FIA, and the Formula 1 teams have been invited to contribute to this process.

“In addition to these short-term measures, the FIA will convene a technical meeting with the teams in order to define measures that will reduce the propensity of cars to exhibit such phenomena in the medium term.”