Mercedes' difficult start to the 2022 season continues as the W13 looks to be a handful to drive around the Albert Park circuit in Melbourne. With the team struggling to get to grips with their new challenger, star driver Lewis Hamilton admits he is happy to return to the top 5 after his shock exit in Q1 last time out in Jeddah.

“Compared to yesterday yeah, and also compared to the last race for me, this is nice to be back up there.” The seven-time champion said to Sky Sports. “Jeddah was really really tough to be so far back and not really be able to make a lot of progress and then yesterday was a difficult day. We had a bigger deficit and we worked hard through the night. Everyone back at the factory was working hard to figure out where we could go with the setup.”

An overnight improvement saw Hamilton jump from P13 in FP2 on friday afternoon to a respectable P5 result in qualifying. Hamilton also admits that, despite the team extracting the maximum pace from the car, his own performance left some pace on the table.

“I think we’ve extracted the most from the car today.” He said. “I feel like, my lap, I feel like there was a little bit more in the car, so that’s a positive. Naturally, also gutted that I wasn't able to extract that little bit but the problem is as I said, when you push that car just a little bit more, she’s quite spiteful. She’s like a viper or like a rattlesnake, you never know.”

Hamilton continued to discuss the difficulty Mercedes are facing in managing their porpoising issues and even admitted his own car is different to teammate George Russell’s as the team hope to gather as much information as possible to help them combat the issue.

“Basically we just have to try and find a level of the bouncing, as hardcore as we can go without rattling our brains out of our skulls, so that’s what we try to do. He [George Russell] and I have slightly different cars, because we’re trying all those different things. 

“I’ve got something on my car which makes the car a little bit Cheavier but it’s not a huge huge step. Hopefully it will enable the team to gain more information from the race tomorrow. I hope from that we can start making some progress.”