“There’s definitely data that we’re picking through from Jeddah,” Shovlin said. “We’re also looking at data from the Bahrain race [and the] Bahrain test and we will come up with a plan for how we approach free practice in Melbourne. But it’s not just based on what we did in Jeddah.
“There’s a lot of work going on within the aerodynamics department, vehicle dynamics department.
“We’re trying to design some experiments there that will hopefully give us a direction that’s good for performance.”
“The balance wasn’t great. So those very fast corners, the walls aren’t particularly far away – so the ones where the driver wants a lot of confidence – and quite often we were snapping to oversteer if they really leaned on the tyres.
“And you can easily imagine how unsettling that is for the drivers. Now, that was a factor in qualifying and the race.
“In qualifying we were also suffering a bit with the bouncing. That was less of a problem in the race. There’s more fuel on the car. You’re going a bit slower. And that seemed to calm down, and wasn’t such an issue.
“And then the big one is we don’t really have enough grip there. So that’s one of the things that we are working hard on this week, because Melbourne has similar nature of corners.
“So we’re doing a lot of work to try and understand why did we not seem to have the grip of some of our close competitors.”