Mercedes final upgrade of 2022, due to be introduced next weekend at COTA, is more about 2023 than ending this season's win drought.

Having seemingly looked on longingly as Red Bull introduced upgrade after upgrade, Mercedes is set to introduce its final upgrade at the Circuit of the Americas next weekend.

However, with Lewis Hamilton facing his first win-less season since entering sport and Mercedes failing to make it to the top step of the podium at least once since 2011, the upgrade is more with 2023 in mind than turning this season around.

Down as much as 10 kmp/h on the straights in Japan and still suffering weight issues, the upgrade is aimed at alleviating both issues.

"It's our final step of aero development and will hopefully give us a bit more performance," says Trackside Engineering Director, Andrew Shovlin in the latest video debrief from the German team.

"Importantly with every step, we are learning more and more," he continues, "and that learning we can carry into next year.

"Also, we have taken some weight out of components that will hopefully get the car closer to the weight limit," he adds.

"It's very difficult for us to predict where we are going to be," says, referring to next weeks United States Grand Prix. "In Singapore Lewis was awfully close to pole position, yet in Suzuka both cars had a big gap to the front.

"Our race pace has been reasonably strong," he adds. "If we can make a step, hopefully we can get into the fight with the Ferraris and the Red Bulls, but qualifying for us is the really difficult one to predict at the moment.

"As I said a lot of it is about learning and we are certainly going to give it our best shot in the final four races."

Regarding COTA, he says: "It's a tricky circuit and it was a tricky circuit for us last year. It was very bumpy, there was a lot of overheating as well from the tyres, and we weren’t performing as well as Red Bull were on the softer tyres.

"They have done some resurfacing," he continues, "so hopefully those issues with the bumps are a bit less. But what's very hard this year is to really know where you are going to be on the circuit before you've gone there.

"We will not make any predictions about where we are going to perform, we just need to go there on Friday, see what kind of issues we have, and then see whether we can solve those with set-up."

Always ready to admit to its mistakes, Shovlin says the team was wrong in sticking with its high downforce rear wing over the Suzuka weekend, and also wrong in double-stacking its drivers during the race.

"We decided to stay at our highest downforce level," he says. "Part of that decision was that it was actually giving us the best lap times in the race condition where we were going to get high degradation in the dry, but we had also seen this rain that was coming in on Sunday, and we felt that in a wet race that might be a benefit.

"As it happens, the DRS was never enabled, and that meant that overtaking was very, very hard and perhaps the right decision would have been a lower downforce setting.

"Fundamentally, one of the things that we need to improve on the car for next year is to get the car to have more downforce at the lower drag levels, and then we can race those lighter wings and still be competitive in the corners.

"We've gone through all the timing of that," he said of the double-stacking on Lap 7 of the race, which saw Hamilton and Russell enter the pitlane 6th and 7th but rejoin in 9th and 14th, "and we have concluded that no, it wasn’t the right decision.

"We should have done what George was asking, which was to give him the lap in clean air. We had seen that the intermediates were a lot quicker, so on the wets you would have lost time on track.

"But the problem was George and Lewis were a bit too close for us to be able to do the pit stop without losing some time and that time ultimately cost George the position to Tsunoda and possibly even the position to Lando. So it gave him a bit more of a challenge to deal with having to pass those cars to try and find any clean air."