Mercedes made more progress since season began than during winter

Mercedes driver George Russell believes the team have gained more performance since the start of the season than throughout the entire winter.

The team has endured a frustrating start to 2023 championship, running behind rivals Red Bull for the second year in succession and being beaten by power unit customers Aston Martin.

Speaking ahead of this weekend’s Australian Grand Prix, Russell admitted Mercedes had been forced to re-evaluate what it expected to get out of the 2023 season following their slow start to the year.

“I think it’s a case of managing expectations and just focusing on yourself and that development,” Russell said.

“We all believed over the winter what we were doing was correct because it was an evolution of what we did throughout last year. And we all saw the improvements we made as a team throughout last year to win a race at the end of the year and be fighting at the front. It caught us by surprise to see the lack of performance when we hit the track in Bahrain and that’s why we were quick to change our approach.”

The team was quick to begin evaluating alternatives. “Already on the Saturday night of the Bahrain Grand Prix we were trying different things, going in a different direction with the development because we’d recognised with maybe gone too far,” said Russell.

“So I’m not going to sit here and say we’re incredibly optimistic. What I always say is we are making improvements and that should translate into lap time. But we recognise that Red Bull are over a second down the road at the moment.”

Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and go ad-free

Russell is confident that Mercedes will find more performance from their W14 and says it has already begun to extract more speed from the car from what they had at the start of the season in Bahrain.

“We’re working really hard at the moment with these changes, so I won’t give too much away,” he said.

“We need to make sure that they work as expected. But we’re probably finding more gains in the past two or three weeks than we found over the whole winter by clearly developing in the wrong window. So it’s definitely heading in the right direction.”

Mercedes’ updates will take time to arrive, said Russell, but he’s hopeful they will have a significant effect on his car’s performance when they do.

“We’re here to fight for victories, for the championship, and clearly we’re not in a position to do that at the moment,” he said.

“Big changes are…