Brazilian Grand Prix winner George Russell thinks Mercedes has improved its 2022 Formula 1 car by more than a second since the opening round of the season in Bahrain, through a process tech chief Mike Elliott has described as “peeling the layers of an onion”.
Russell took his maiden grand prix victory, leading a one-two from team-mate Lewis Hamilton, at the penultimate round of the season at Interlagos last weekend.
It ensured Mercedes extended its run of winning at least one grand prix to 12 consecutive seasons, at the end of a 2022 F1 campaign it started far from the pace of rivals Red Bull and Ferrari.
Though Hamilton and Russell finished the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix third and fourth, the W13 was 0.680s – or 0.751% – off the pace in qualifying.
Its nadir in terms of deficit to the front on single-lap pace came at Imola in April when 11th-placed Russell was 1.964s – 2.493% – from Max Verstappen’s pace-setting Red Bull.
Asked how much quicker he thought Mercedes would have been in Bahrain had it started the season with the current version of its W13, Russell said: “Definitely well over a second, I would say.
“In Bahrain I qualified ninth. At Imola, both Lewis and I were out in Q2.
“We were fighting with Alfa Romeo and Haas at the start of the season and well over a second, at points, behind Ferrari, who were looking the most dominant team at the time.”
Mercedes was one of the teams worst affected by the porpoising phenomenon experienced by the 2022 generation of cars, and though its shortcomings have been more widespread than that it took time for the team to understand those while it battled its porpoising issues.
It gradually got on top of its problems, particularly in the second half of the season, and has pursued an aggressive development strategy with a W13 that it felt had enough potential not to give up on.
That development process continued until the Mexican GP at the end of October, when Mercedes ran a revised front wing that was originally due to make its debut as part of an upgrade package introduced the weekend before in Austin.
“I think it really goes to show the improvement we’ve made,” said Russell of Mercedes’ current pace relative to Ferrari.
“We lost so much time trying to solve the porpoising issues and that really hurt our development. I think that’s why we’re seeing such a jump in performance in these past eight races.
“It’s because we’re no longer focusing on the porpoising and we’re now focused on bringing performance.”
Speaking in Mercedes’ customary post-race debrief video, Elliott said: “I’ve described it a bit like peeling the layers of an onion.
The first layer was the aero bouncing, which we had the beginning of the season.
The second layer was then some of the ride issues that then came in after that. And what we wanted to know is – is there another layer, is there something else we needed to discover, needed to fix for next year’s car? So that’s been our main focus.
“And then in Austin we came with an upgrade kit, that took that understanding and took the first steps to what we needed to do for next year. And since then we’ve seen a good performance level from the car. Probably not quite where we want to be yet, but the right signs of the things that we need to do over the winter.
“And I think that’s probably the most important thing that we got out of this weekend. The 1-2 is fantastic for the team, fantastic for our drivers – but actually the learning and showing that that learning is turning into performance, is what’s really key for next year’s car.”
Russell and/or Hamilton have now finished ahead of Ferrari drivers Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz at the last three grands prix.
There are now 19 points separating the two teams in the battle for second place in the constructors’ championship ahead of this weekend’s Abu Dhabi season finale.
Though Russell described Mercedes as having added “global performance” to its car throughout the year, the feeling in Brazil was “not too dissimilar to what it felt like at the start of the year”.
“The only difference is when we crossed the line and an engineer comes onto the radio, it’s talking top fives always as opposed to out in Q2, or whatever,” he said.
“So, I think that gives us – especially Lewis and I – so much confidence because if this is what we’re capable of doing as a team, when the car is still performing… sub-optimally, who knows what we can achieve when we get it into a nicer window?
“And we really think next year, we’re going to have a car that, its characteristics, will be feeling nicer, which will give Lewis and I more confidence to push it.”
