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George Russell believes Mercedes' 2023 F1 car will be more competitive than the 2022 version, which went through its share of issues throughout the season. The Mercedes driver feels confident about the direction the team has taken with the development of the 2023 car.
Speaking to the on-site media, including Sportskeeda, in a team press session, the Mercedes driver said:
“I’m confident that the direction we need to take is the correct one. We have a philosophy that we’re going to be trying to adopt in our development, and I’m very confident that is the correct one. But equally, it doesn’t mean that we can necessarily achieve it. We have a target, and that is a massive positive in itself. As I said, we have a clear target we’re trying to chase.”
According to the Mercedes driver, they have been able to correct many issues in the 2023 car. Confident about the development of next year’s car, George Russell suggests next season will be more smooth sailing for his team compared to this year.
Further expressing confidence in the development of Mercedes’ 2023 challenger, the Briton said:
“Now, can we achieve that? I have every confidence that we can. We obviously don’t know how much the other rivals are going to improve over this winter. But I definitely have confidence that we will have a more complete car across the circuit ranges into 2023?”
George Russell believes Mercedes have managed to find answers to their issues over the season
George Russell believes that Mercedes have been able to gather enough data across a plethora of circuits this season to be able to understand their car. Suggesting that they have been able to understand their car better, the British driver feels they have ironed out most of their issues. Russell also claims most of their understanding of the car is data-driven and has made them more confident about their design philosophy and development direction for 2023.
Explaining the analytics behind their understanding of the car, the Briton said:
“It’s data-driven, to be honest. We’ve done a lot of analysis on the races we’ve been competitive, the races we’ve been slow, and trying to understand why that was. I think we’ve managed to get quite a grasp onto that, and understand why at certain circuits we were so much more. I have to say, I’ve mentioned a couple of times this year that I feel like we’ve understood our car, and we’re on the right track, but we have been set back with a couple of oddities that we weren’t expecting. But I think we’ve had enough races now that we’ve gone through so many different scenarios that I can’t really imagine there’s going to be another one that catches us by surprise.”
Further explaining the functioning of his tools, George Russell said:
“We’ve had the porpoising issues, we’ve had the ride issues, we’ve had the car touching the ground and damaging the floor issue. We’ve had so many different issues, and we believe now that we’ve got a direction that we need to head in. Hopefully, the lap time can come with it.”
According to the Mercedes driver, there are barely any issues he can think of that need to be ironed out in the W13. George Russell believes it will be surprising if more issues crop up in the current car. The upcoming Singapore GP will be a litmus test for the development of the W13 given the track's bumpy surface and unique characteristics.
