Lewis Hamilton said he was “worried” about the Canadian Grand Prix after saying Sunday’s race in Baku was “the most painful I’ve experienced”.
Hamilton said the high-speed bouncing of his car meant the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, in which he finished fourth, was “the toughest race” of his career.
Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff said Hamilton was “definitely” a doubt for next weekend’s race in Montreal.
Hamilton said: “I always want to get in the car. I just don’t want bouncing.”
He added: “I would do anything to avoid having that. (I am) worried for every time I am going to be back in the car.”
Mercedes have been afflicted by bouncing, which has a number of causes, since the beginning of the year. They felt they had fixed one of the causes with car upgrades two races ago in Spain, but it has returned in a different form since.
Hamilton, who climbed out of his car gingerly after the race and rubbed his back, said: “There were a lot of moments when I didn’t know whether I was going to make it, whether I was going to keep the car on track.
“I nearly lost it in the high-speed (corners) several times. The battle with the car was intense. Last 10 laps, I was just having to go internal: you’ve got this, you’ve got this, just bear with it.”
He added that driving the car required a similar type of mental management as the cryotherapy he has been undertaking to treat the pain caused by it.
“I have been doing cryotherapy and when you go in there for four minutes it’s bloody cold and you just have to go internal and just say you can and it’s the same kind of thing,” Hamilton said.
“Just biting down and gritting with it. I have to think of all the people who rely on me to get the points. This was the worst for me. I haven’t had it this bad this year.”
He added that the car was bouncing so badly through the high-speed kinks at the start of Baku’s pit ‘straight’ that he thought he might crash.
“The thing was bouncing so much, there were so many times I was nearly going into the wall,” Hamilton said. “That was a concern.
“Safety-wise at 180mph, smashing into the wall; I don’t think I’ve really had to think about that too much as a racing driver. It is a very strange experience.”
Hamilton’s team-mate George Russell, who finished one place ahead in third, is leading a campaign by the drivers to try to persuade F1’s governing body to take action to change the cars to remove the bouncing.
The issue is also known as ‘porpoising’ and has returned to F1 for the first time in 40 years this season as a result of the new car designs introduced to make the racing closer.
This has introduced an aerodynamic philosophy known as ‘ground effect’, which requires the cars to run as low as possible for maximum performance. But doing this can trigger a disruption in underbody airflow, which then causes high-frequency bouncing as the airflow fluctuates.
However, eight of the 10 teams are required to agree for a change to be introduced, unless the FIA decides it wants to introduce it on safety grounds, and the teams voted against making an immediate change in a meeting over the course of the Azerbaijan race weekend.
Russell said: “It’s totally understandable because every team is developing their car around a set of regulations and with any change. no-one knows what the consequences are.
“We want change but who knows what that change is? It’s just us 20 drivers. We would choose to have a safer ride out there. I couldn’t even see my pit board, the car was moving around so much.
“We have the technology to remove this with the click of our fingers, I believe, no-one is looking to take advantage, we are just looking for a safer solution.”
Hamilton said: “All the drivers are discussing it together in the drivers’ briefing and ultimately none of us want to continue having this bouncing for the next four years of this regulation. So I’m sure the teams will be working at it.”
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner, whose drivers finished one-two in the race, said: “The easiest thing is to raise the car. You have a choice where to run your car and you should never run a car that is unsafe.
“Some cars have issues and some have very few issues. It would seem unfair to penalise those who have done a decent job versus those who have missed the target slightly.”
Red Bull are the team least affected by porpoising but sources say that in the drivers’ briefing, world champion Max Verstappen also backed the idea of making changes to resolve the issue in the future.
Horner admitted that if his car were causing as much of a problem as the Mercedes: “I would tell (the drivers) to bitch as much as they could over the radio and make as big an issue as they could. It’s part of the game.
“You can see it’s uncomfortable but there are remedies to that. But it is to the detriment of car performance so the easiest thing to do is complain from a safety point of view.
“But each team has a choice. If it were a genuine safety concern across the grid, it should be looked at, but if it’s only affecting isolated teams then that’s something that team should potentially deal with.”
