He suggested that after its core bouncing issues last year it may have “overshot” in addressing the problem and “compromised too much performance, too much downforce”. Russell reckons that Mercedes set “incorrect” targets for itself and misjudged what was needed combined with the FIA’s floor rule changes for 2023 increasing the height of the edges by 15mm. “Something has changed over the winter, the FIA have changed the rules with the floor, we probably haven’t captured that in the way others have, we’ve overlooked this and we’re not where we want to be.”

“There’s never any 100% certainty because if I’m being honest, sat here after Brazil, I would have said I’m 100% certain the path we’re on is the right path and all of you in the room would have probably believed it looking at the progression we’ve made. “We’re pretty sure of the direction we need to go down,” said Russell. Russell said that a team meeting on Tuesday last week answered the questions of “what went wrong, how they went wrong, and what are we going to do to fix it”. It was bullish that it would be more competitive in 2023 after getting on top of the root causes of last year’s limitations and making significant changes to address them.īut despite hitting its targets, Mercedes received a reality check in Bahrain, where it started the season with a comprehensive defeat to pacesetter Red Bull and was also beaten by Aston Martin and Ferrari. Mercedes had a difficult 2022 season beset by car bouncing problems and a lack of performance due to the compromises required to deal with that. George Russell has indicated Mercedes has the first key “answers” about where it went wrong with its 2023 Formula 1 car and what it needs to do to address that.

Key root master