The Silver Arrows are still working to understand where they can improve and become more competitive.
With four races left on the 2022 F1 calendar, the Brackley-based team intends to bring its last upgrades for the W13 to the United States Grand Prix.
According to George Russell, Mercedes’ data-driven approach, has allowed them to better understand their car for the upcoming races.
He stated: “It’s data driven, to be honest. 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.”
“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.
“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.”
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Russell further emphasized his confidence in the work they have done so far and his belief that it will offer them a competitive edge in 2023.
“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,” he added.
“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.”
The 24-year-old does not anticipate any further issues impeding their performance on the track in the season’s final four races.
“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,” he explained.
“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.”
