Hamilton: Experimental set-up in FP2 'didn’t feel that great'

Lewis Hamilton says he ran a different set-up to Mercedes teammate George Russell in Friday's second practice in Baku in a bid to improve his car's bouncing issues but the test proved unsatisfactory.

In Barcelona, team boss Toto Wolff felt confident that Mercedes' engineers had put themselves on top of the W13's chronic porpoising issues, a claim supported by Russell's podium in Spain.

However, in Monaco the bouncing returned although Wolff put his drivers' bumpy ride on the track rather than on the silver arrow's aerodynamics.

But in Baku on Friday, porpoising was ever-present once again, much to Hamilton's frustration, with the Briton ending the session P12, 1.65s off Ferrari pacesetter Charles Leclerc.

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"We’re hitting some serious speeds at the end here and it’s bouncing a lot," he explained. "It’s pretty much the same as in the last race, really.

"We tried something experimental on my car and it didn’t feel that great to be honest. But at least we tried it and got data on it and now we’ll go through it and hopefully for tomorrow we’ll probably revert back to what we changed.

"I just can’t really tell you where 1.6 seconds or 1.3 seconds, whatever, is. That’s a long way away. A lot of it’s on straights."

Russell, who finished FP2 in seventh position, pointed to his tyres as another culprit responsible for Mercedes' disappointing performance on what he called a "tricky day".

"It’s again a tricky track to get the tyres in the right window," he said.

"You see a number of drivers, their fastest laps are coming right at the end of a run, whereas Ferrari and Red Bull seem to be able to turn it on.

"So that’s really 50% of our issue. The rest is just the lack of performance we have at the moment."

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