George Russell is confident that Mercedes has overcome the issue that has hindered their performance from the previous season.
After completing 121 laps in the newly unveiled W15, Russell expressed a significantly higher level of confidence in this model compared to its predecessor.
“The car last year was really challenging to drive,” said Rusell. “Lewis and I had no confidence in it. It felt like it was going to bite us at every single corner.
“Now we can attack the medium and high-speed corners without the rear end snapping out. 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.”
Russell is optimistic that the new vehicle represents a solid foundation for the team’s development efforts throughout the upcoming season.
“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, whatever we did aerodynamically, there was underlying issues with the race car that took a while to understand and solve.”
“You can definitely tell from the very beginning if the car’s an improvement and if it’s nice to drive. 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.
“We have a 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 to wait and 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.”
He is hopeful the team will be able to make rapid gains on Red Bull, who have dominated the last two seasons of F1 since the current regulations were introduced.
“When the car feels nice, but it’s not quite at the pace, you just need to find downforce in the right places,” he explained. “But in 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. 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 it’s going to take a lot of hard work to do so.”
With Lewis Hamilton taking over the W15 on the second day, Mercedes came alive placing third in the standings compared George Russell’s twelfth on the opening day of pre-season testing
