George Russell, Mercedes Formula 1 driver, does not have high expectations from the team any time soon. He believes the team’s push for car enhancement won’t yield promising results.
The British driver and his team-mate Lewis Hamilton have struggled with the porpoising effect. The W13 of the German team failed to match the performance of Ferrari and Red Bull from the start of the season.
However, strong finishing record has helped the team stay in top contenders. Nonetheless, it has realization to do more and to find the pace to top the season.
Mercedes is working continuously to diagnose the porpoising issue. The issue has compromised the W13 performance, while the team is planning to resolve the issues with upgrades.
However, Russell have opposite opinion on the matter. He claims that Mercedes is likely to bring smaller tweaks until it reaches the root cause.
“Unfortunately, there’s nothing substantial in the pipeline anytime soon,” he said.
“It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to take a number of races. I think there’ll be little things, there’ll be incremental steps. But we recognise that our rivals are going to be doing the same.
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“So, it may not be clear to the outside world that we’ve made progress. Because Ferrari and Red Bull are going to be making progress as well.”
Toto Wolff, Mercedes boss, speak on how the problem is affecting the upgrades.
“I think we’re just learning the car, we’re learning the tyres,” he explained. “Nothing we did this weekend has unlocked the aerodynamic potential or has reduced the bouncing. We’re still at the same place.
“And that’s why it doesn’t make any sense to bring updates, because you’re confusing yourself even more. Maybe it’s the fact the more down-force you bring, the worse the bouncing gets. So we are still learning.”
Nonetheless, Russell is confident that team will find its place on top.
“I’d love to say we’ve made a lot of progress. But I think we’ve got to look at the lap times and we haven’t closed the gap at all to these guys [Ferrari and Red Bull],” he said.
“We know we’ve got a lot of work to do. But I have faith that we can get there. We know the potential is in the car. And we’ve got a lot of work to do to extract that performance.
“It won’t happen overnight; it won’t happen in the next race. But I do think in time we will get there. So, for the time being, if we keep picking up these results, it’s keeping us in the mix.”
