George Russell is confident that Mercedes will craft a “more complete” car for the 2023 Formula 1 season after a shift of “philosophy” in development.
Russell has produced a series of strong performances in his first season in the Mercedes fold, but has struggled to regularly challenge Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, who is set to secure a second consecutive world title with several races to spare.
The 24-year-old British driver sits fourth in the Drivers’ Championship standings, 33 points ahead of teammate Lewis Hamilton.
Significant challenges with their W13 car mean that Mercedes are yet to win in 2022, with the team’s eight-year dominance of the Constructors’ Championship at an end.
That has necessitated a shift of strategy and Russell has “every confidence” that he and his team will be more competitive next season.
“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,” said Russell after finishing 14th on an incident-plagued weekend at the Singapore Grand Prix.
“We have a target, and that is a massive positive in itself. We know what we’re chasing, we have a clear target we’re trying to chase now.
“Can we achieve that? I have every confidence that we can. We obviously don’t know how much our rivals are going to improve over this winter, but I definitely have confidence that we will have a more complete car across the circuit range going into 2023.”
An offseason overhaul of design regulations led to significant early-season intrigue as teams unveiled new cars for the 2022 F1 season.
But Mercedes grappled to get to grips with the re-designed W13, with porpoising a persistent problem and other issues stalling their progress.
Mercedes have had their issues this season, limiting the effectiveness of Russell and Lewis Hamilton
(Getty Images)
Russell, though, is now sure that Toto Wolff’s team are aware of the improvements that need to be made to allow him and compatriot Hamilton to contend next year.
“We do a lot of analysis on the races we’ve been competitive, the races we’ve been slow, and trying to understand why that was and I think we’ve managed to gain quite a grasp onto that and understand why at certain circuits we were so much more competitive than others,” Russell explained.
“We’ve only managed to learn that over the course of these races and I think that triple-header after the summer break was quite telling for us, with our performance between the low-downforce and high-downforce circuits.
“I don’t want to go into too much detail because it’s something that we’ve worked very hard on to understand and hopefully will give us an advantage into next year, so I don’t want to say anything that will potentially benefit our rivals.
“But at the end of the day every single car is different. I have to say I mentioned a couple of times this year that I thought we understood our car and were on the right track, but we have been set back with a couple of issues that we weren’t expecting.
“But I think we’ve had enough races now, that we’ve gone through so many different scenarios, I can’t really imagine there’s going to be another one that catches us by surprise.
“We’ve had the porpoising issues, we’ve had the ride issues, we’ve had the car touching the ground and damaging the floor, we’ve had so many different issues and we believe now that we’ve got a direction that we need to head in.”
The Formula 1 season continues with the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka on Sunday 9 October.
