F1 News: George Russell Confident That W15 F1 Car Not A "Rushed" Concept Like Its Predecessor
Emphasizing that Mercedes is using an entirely new approach for its 2024 W15 F1 car, George Russell explained that the team had been working on its latest title contender for a long time, so, it won't be a "rushed" concept like the W14 car from 2023 that the team struggled with.
Since the inception of the ground effect era in 2022, Mercedes has been missing its targets, courtesy of its W13 and W14 cars of 2022 and 2023 and Red Bull's hardcore RB19 dominance that helped it to secure 21 Grand Prix victories out of the 22 races last year.
While the Brackley outfit struggled in 2022, 2023 saw the return of the 'zeropod' concept that should have been abandoned after the previous F1 season. Mercedes realized it the hard way and eventually gave up its design to opt for a concept similar to Red Bull's title contender.
Courtesy of Russell and Lewis Hamilton, their team managed to just finish second in the 2023 Constructors' Championship while piloting an unpredictable car. But the former is confident that the W15 car of this year won't be a repetition of the last two cars as the team had enough data by the end of last year to identify the do's and don'ts with the new car's design. Speaking to Motorsport.com, he said:
"I think last year it was all a little bit rushed.
“We didn’t have all the information to hand, we may have jumped to a couple of conclusions without thoroughly going through the consequences.
“And we learned when the car hit the ground this year that we made a step forward in some regards, but it came with a lot of baggage and we hadn’t taken that into consideration.
“So, I think we’ve done a great job to truly understand what we need.
“We’ve obviously had a further 12 months’ experience to further understand the car and what brings the performance.
“I think last year we put all our eggs in one basket and that wasn’t a basket that provided the performance we were expecting.
“[But], the fact is we’ve got to close a huge gap.
“The Red Bull dominance this year is probably the greatest - I think statistically it is the most dominant car ever, so we’ve all got a huge task on our hands.
“But I’m going into next year with an open mind.
“I don’t think anyone’s expecting either us, McLaren, Aston Martin or Ferrari to make that step straightaway.
“But [I’m] definitely confident we won’t fall into some of the same traps we did this [last] year.”
