George Russell admits that Mercedes’ pace during the opening day of practice in Baku was down on its pre-weekend expectations.
Russell ended the second practice session on Friday in seventh place, 1.3 seconds off the pace set by Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc.
Team-mate Lewis Hamilton was further down the order, logging the 12th fastest time at the chequered flag.
Mercedes has struggled with its car at the start of the 2022 campaign, and is yet to compete for a race victory following its period of success throughout the turbo-hybrid era.
While Russell says that much of Mercedes’ issues from Friday revolved around the Pirelli tyres, he’s not convinced that solving the problem will bring it close to the front of the field.
“Trying to make the car go faster [was the main goal], to be honest,” Russell said. “It was a tricky day, we weren’t as competitive as we would have liked.
“Again, a tricky track to get the tyres in the right window. You see with a number of drivers, their fastest laps were coming right at the end of the run.
“Whereas Ferrari and Red Bull, they seemed to be able to turn it on. At the moment, they just have an inherently faster car than us and we’ve done everything we can to try and catch up.
“I think if we’re totally on top of the tyres we’re not going to fully close that gap – or we’re definitely not going to close that gap, they’re just too far ahead.
“So that’s probably 50% of our issues – the rest is just the lack of performance we have at the moment.”
Russell’s team-mate Hamilton says that tyres were not so much an issue for him, believing a chunk of his time is being lost on the straights.
“[The] tyres feel, to us, they feel like they’re working well,” he said. “No issues with starting the lap.
“I just can’t really tell you where 1.6 seconds or 1.3s or whatever it is, that’s a long way away. A lot of it’s on straights.
“We tried something experimental on my car [for FP2] and it didn’t feel that great, to be honest, but at least we tried it and got data on it.
“Now we’ll go through it and hopefully for tomorrow we’ll probably revert back to what we changed.”
