George Russell, like team-mate Lewis Hamilton, hopes Mercedes will be able to provide him with an F1 car capable of winning races against Max Verstappen and Red Bull in 2024
George Russell expressed his belief that his Mercedes team will learn from its mistakes this winter, saying that the team “rushed” the design of the 2023 car.
Russell’s team faces a formidable task in creating and refining the W15. Compared to its two predecessors, whose drivers only managed one win between them, it needs to be far more competitive.
Russell was the one who made sure that victory at the Brazilian Grand Prix in 2022. Lewis Hamilton, a teammate, has not won an F1 race in over two years, which is by far the longest streak of his illustrious career.
Mercedes has been lagging behind Red Bull ever since they failed to adjust to the new automotive regulations in 2022. For their 2023 W14 car, they remained steadfast, but they soon realized they were headed in the wrong direction and made a swift turnabout.
It is already evident that team principal Toto Wolff and his colleagues are essentially starting from scratch on the W15, with a completely new concept and design from front to back. Furthermore, Russell is happy with the “due diligence” he has observed in his colleagues’ design of his new racing machine.
He told Autosport, “I think it was all a little bit rushed last year.” Since we didn’t have all the facts at our disposal, we might have made a few snap judgments without fully considering the ramifications.
“And we discovered that, although we had made progress in some areas, the car came with a lot of baggage, which we hadn’t taken into account when it crashed this year. We’ve done a great job, in my opinion, of really understanding what we need.
Obviously, we’ve had an additional year of experience to better understand the vehicle and what makes it perform. I believe that the previous year, we put all of our eggs into one basket, and it didn’t yield the results we had hoped for.
“The truth is that we need to close a sizable gap. We all have a very difficult task ahead of us because Red Bull’s dominance [in 2023] is likely the greatest—statistically, I believe it to be the most dominant car ever. However, I’m keeping an open mind for the upcoming year.
Nobody is probably expecting Ferrari, McLaren, Aston Martin, or us to take that step right away. However, [I’m] positive that we won’t fall into some of the same pitfalls that we did this year.
