George Russell is convinced that the problems that hampered Mercedes during the ground-effect era will not be prevalent during Formula 1‘s next regulation cycle.
Mercedes entered the previous rules change in 2022 billed as the team to beat, having won an unprecedented eight straight Constructors’ titles from 2014 to 2021.
However, the German marque was unable to sustain that success with the recent generation cars, clinching only six victories over the past four seasons combined.
Having been unable to rival Red Bull in 2022 and 2023, Mercedes then watched engine customer McLaren eclipse it and go on to claim consecutive championships.
“I think it’s been an extremely challenging set of regs, to be honest,” Russell told media including Motorsport Week.
“And obviously, this second half of the year, Red Bull have been on a very high level.
“But if I were to answer that question at the summer break, I would have argued that we were at a similar level to Red Bull.
“And if you compare that to ’23 – Aston Martin were ahead of ourselves and Ferrari and dropped off, McLaren were nowhere and obviously just found something pretty spectacular.”
Why Mercedes struggled with recent F1 cars
Russell believes that Mercedes’ perpetual struggles can be linked back to the setbacks it encountered with the ambitious ‘zeropod’ concept out of the blocks in 2022.
“So, I can’t really answer that question – what it is we’ve missed,” he continued.
“I think it’s probably more where we started. I think we probably started in the wrong place and led ourselves down the wrong path and then had to revert.
“And clearly Red Bull, out of the blocks, had the least amount of porpoising in ’22 and almost had a six- or eight-month head start on everybody while we were trying to work that out.
“So, I don’t think this regulation is really going to have any impact on the next set of regs, because the issues are going to be totally different.”
READ MORE – Williams raises rumour behind Mercedes 2026 dominance fears
Discussion about this post