Mercedes can focus on downforce rather than problem-solving with its 2024 Formula 1 car as it’s “not the diva that it was in the last two years”, according to George Russell.
Mercedes has committed to an overhauled concept with the W15 as it bids to bridge the deficit to Red Bull after enduring a first winless F1 season since 2011 last term.
Mercedes Technical Director James Allison explained that the group has bid to address the “spiteful” rear-end instability that hampered both drivers with its predecessor.
Russell offered a positive initial assessment of the German marque’s latest ground effect machine on the first day of 2024 pre-season testing, citing that it felt “nicer to drive”.
Despite that optimism, Russell is aware that Mercedes has a “mountain to climb” to catch Red Bull and accepts that the extent of its progress will be delivered on the stopwatch.
“You can definitely tell from the very beginning if the car is an improvement and if it’s nice to drive,” he said. “And 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, and we have a huge, 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 a way to 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.”
The root cause of Mercedes’ struggles last season derived from retaining the ‘zeropod’ solution it had conceived at the start of this regulation cycle and then opted to abandon.
Although it converged on the downwash philosophy pioneered by Red Bull, Mercedes remained hampered by its launch-spec W14 chassis under the limitations of the cost cap.
Russell believes Mercedes has got on top of such troubles with its revamped car, allowing the engineers to dedicate their time to discovering further performance gains.
“The car last year was really challenging to drive. Lewis [Hamilton] and I had no confidence in it. It felt like it was going to bite us every single corner,” Russell recalled.
“We can attack the medium and high-speed corners [now] without the rear end snapping out. And 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 and 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, you know, whatever we did aerodynamically there was underlying issues with the race car that took a while to understand and solve.
“When the car feels nice but it’s not quite on the pace, you just need to find downforce in the right places.”
The porpoising phenomenon is one area that thwarted Mercedes from making its slim sidepod configuration produce the same numbers it had identified in the wind tunnel.
While Mercedes appears to have avoided similar bouncing problems this time around, Russell believes the team is still figuring out how low it can run its car to the ground.
“This iteration of regulations, there’s definitely a sweet spot for all of the teams,” he continued. “You want the car as low as possible but you can’t go too low in case you’re bottoming out or you cause bouncing which is still a little bit there in the background for some teams.
“And it doesn’t take a lot to find that sweet spot and find a lot of performance.
“Hopefully Red Bull are already in that sweet spot and we can close that gap but yeah it’s gonna take a lot of hard work to do so.”
Red Bull dominated the previous season en route to winning all but one race and the reigning champions opened testing with Max Verstappen over a second clear of the rest.
Russell, who languished in 12th place as Mercedes focused on compiling mileage on the W15, is not surprised that the Austrian outfit has appeared to retain its advantage.
“I think probably as you’d expect from Red Bull they’re in such a great momentum at the moment and they started this these new regulations on the front floor and they came here have been solid ever since,” he said.
“As I said, they were definitely the favourites, they’re definitely a step ahead of everybody else here in Bahrain.
“So they’ve had an impressive winter no doubt, but that was to be expected. Such an impressive team and outfit, and we need to see where we fall out in the coming races.”
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