18/03/2023
NEWS STORY
George Russell claims that his win in the penultimate race of the 2022 season caused Mercedes to head down the wrong path when it came to the W13's successor.
The German team's efforts to get back on top following a disastrous start to the season, though commendable, may have been the worst possible thing, for Russell's victory at Interlagos led the world champions to believe that the W13's concept was correct and consequently they carried it over to the W14, which they now realise was a mistake.
"Perhaps Brazil did lead us down a bit of a wrong path," Brazil winner, George Russell told reporters in Jeddah, "because we did feel like we were improving as a team, that we were going in the right direction.
"That needs some analysis," he continued, "because we did improve throughout last year, there's no two ways about it, and especially towards the end of the year, we truly thought we were onto something.
"So the W14 is probably a more extreme version of the car we had at the end of last year. Clearly others have gone in different directions, while we've gone further in that direction, and it wasn't the right one."
Th Briton also claims that the ruling that saw teams have to raise the floor by 20mm - claimed by many to aid Mercedes' plight - hasn't helped.
"There's never any 100% certainty," he admitted, "but after Brazil, I would have said 'I'm 100% certain the path we're on is the right path'. All of you in the room would have probably believed it as well, looking at the progression we've made.
"So something's changed over the winter... the FIA has changed the rules to the floor. We probably haven't captured that in the way that others have. We've overlooked this and we're not where we want to be so there's never 100% certainty."
Of course, in Bahrain, the team's worst fears were realised.
"Is it one second we're looking for compared to Red Bull? No, it's not," said Russell. "Do we think we're on the right track with our philosophy? Probably not either.
"So the team came together on Tuesday last week and we had some very good, honest, open conversations. A lot of the questions were answered as to how we got ourselves in this position in the first place, what are we going to do short term, medium term to get out of it? what path do we want to be on?
"Those changes are already in place, to get us back on the track that we believe is going to bring us back to victory."
Check out our Saturday gallery from Jeddah here.