© Sulay Kelly for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
George Russell provides more details on how the Mercedes W15 is feeling and the team’s relative pace compared to Red Bull.
Yesterday George Russell had a full day of testing with the Mercedes W15, and at today’s drivers’ press conference he gave his thoughts on how the car is feeling so far.
“You can definitely tell from the very beginning if the car is an improvement and if it’s nice to drive,” the Briton 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.”
George added this year’s car allows the team to more easily focus on its further development.
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“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.
“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.”
In the previous two years Mercedes had some issues with their cars bouncing, especially if they ran it very low. George says they are still figuring out how low they can run the W15.
“This iteration of regulations, there’s definitely a sweet spot for all of the teams. 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.”
Speaking of Red Bull, Max Verstappen easily topped the timesheets on day 1 of testing, and George says he is not surprised by Red Bull’s level of performance.
“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.
“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,” Russell concluded.
