In the round-up: George Russell suspects Mercedes over-reacted to the problems they encountered with last year’s W13 by producing a car which is too conservative this year.
In brief
“Clearly the lap time isn’t there” in W14 – Russell
Russell said there’s “definitely a plan in place” at Mercedes to tackle the problems with their latest car as “it’s been clear where we went wrong over the winter.”
“I think we probably overshot with the W13 in terms of the aggressiveness of the car and the bouncing that we faced,” he told Sky. “And then we probably overshot in the opposite direction with W14 and compromised too much performance with no bouncing and clearly the lap time isn’t there to show anything.
“So of course it’s a difficult pill to swallow for every single member of the team, and its lack of performance is definitely not through a lack of trying or commitment from anybody. But yes, some big decisions are being made and we’ll be jumping onto a slightly different path, well, already.”
Stroll still “not 100%”
Lance Stroll says he’s in much better shape for the second race of the season as his injured wrists continue to heal, but he hasn’t recovered fully yet.
The Aston Martin driver said it was “pretty painful on the Monday” after the Bahrain Grand Prix, where he finished sixth, “but it was a good weekend for the team so it’s worth a bit of pain.”
“It’s feeling better every day so I think the worst part is behind me,” Stroll explained. “I’m still not 100%, it takes a bit of time for these things to heal. But I’m definitely feeling much better than I was 10 days ago in Bahrain.”
Perez is a hit
Sergio Perez is the focus of a hit song in his home country. “Lewis [Hamilton] arrived to the press conference playing it,” he revealed yesterday. “He was dancing to it.”
Perez has tried to play the song, “De 0 A 100 Checo Pérez” by Jary Franco, to his children, with limited success. “Sometimes I play those songs when I take my kids to the school,” he said. “I ask them which song they want to listen to and I push them to say the Checo Perez song. And they always say ‘no’! So we always end up playing different songs.”
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