George Russell believes Mercedes have finally solved the problem which has plagued their cars since the current technical regulations were introduced two years ago.
Having covered 121 laps in the new W15 yesterday, Russell said he felt much more confident in the car than he was in its predecessor.
“The car last year was really challenging to drive,” he said. “Lewis [Hamilton] and I had no confidence in it. It felt like it was going to bite us at every single corner.
“Now we can attack the medium and high-speed corners without the rear end snapping out. We feel like we’ve made a really good step in terms of the consistency of the car.
“We can really lean on it better than we’ve been able to in the past, and this was a huge focus throughout last year. We saw many flaws with the W14 which the team have done a really great job to rectify.”
He believes the new car is a strong starting point for the team’s development programme over the coming season.
“We’ve now got a car mechanically where the aero guys can go and focus on just building downforce upon that. Whereas in the past, whatever we did aerodynamically, there was underlying issues with the race car that took a while to understand and solve.”
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Russell was only 12th fastest yesterday and is cautious about the team’s prospects following their win-less 2023 season.
“You can definitely tell from the very beginning if the car’s an improvement and if it’s nice to drive. It definitely is an improvement, there’s no doubt about that. But you could have the worst car to drive, but if it’s faster than everybody else, you’ll be happy with it.
“So it was definitely pleasurable to drive yesterday. I had a good feeling within the car. But we know that all of the other teams have made a good step forward and right now it’s definitely far too early to say.
“We have a huge mountain to climb to catch up what Red Bull were doing last year and how far ahead of everybody else they were. We need to wait and see. But we’ve definitely got a much better platform to build upon and it’s not the diva that it was in the last two years.”
He is hopeful the team will be able to make rapid gains on Red Bull, who have dominated the last two seasons of F1 since the current regulations were introduced.
“When the car feels nice, but it’s not quite at the pace, you just need to find downforce in the right places,” he explained. “But in this…
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