George Russell says Mercedes are already sure some of the design changes on their new car will make it quicker in a straight line and against the stopwatch than its predecessor.
But he admitted they can’t be sure they won’t get caught out by another “curveball”, as happened last year when they encountered severe porpoising which badly compromised their car’s performance.
“There are definitely improvements that we are sure are going to make the car faster,” he told media including RaceFans yesterday. “The car is going to be lighter than what we saw last year, that is definite lap time [gain], we know that.”
Mercedes has reverted to a black livery for the upcoming season, allowing it to leave more areas of its car unpainted, reducing weight. Last year it resorted to reducing the extent of the paintwork on its car after it was launched.
Russell said another of the W13’s shortcomings has been addressed. “We’ve worked really well and hard on reducing the drag because we saw how much we were losing to Red Bull, particularly last year, and we believe we’ve achieved that,” he said.
“So we should be faster in the straight line as well. And these are things that we know are sort of guaranteed performance.”
However the biggest constraint on the car’s performance is likely to be how much downforce it generates, which was compromised last year by the porpoising they encountered. Russell said it may take a while before the team can be sure they’ve addressed that problem.
“As soon as you brake for a corner, you go through the corner and the downforce needs to start working. We truly don’t know how it’s going to perform and ultimately we don’t know how it’s going to tally up compared to mainly Red Bull and Ferrari.”
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He is confident Mercedes has done the best job it could during the off-season to address its problems with last year’s car.
“I’m confident that we have done the most we possibly can with the information we learned from last year. I fully trust in my team and the way everybody’s working. I think we feel like we have done everything possible with what we know.
“But as we learned last year, there’s sometimes curveballs. And in life you only learn with these experiences. Are we going to get another curveball thrown at us? Who knows. We’re not sure.
“So I think you’ve…
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