George Russell believes Mercedes' data-driven approach has enabled them to better understand their car for the upcoming races. While the team plan to bring their final upgrades for the W13 to the United States Grand Prix , Russell says the Silver Arrows is still putting the work in to understand where they can improve and become more competitive. "It's data driven, to be honest. We do a lot of analysis on the races we've been competitive, the races we've been slow, and trying to understand why that was," he told Sky Sports . "I think we've managed to gain quite a grasp onto that and understand why at certain circuits we were so much more competitive than others. "We've only managed to learn that over the course of these races and I think that triple-header after the summer break was quite telling for us, with our performance between the low-downforce and high-downforce circuits."
Confidence heading into 2023
Russell goes on to further explain his confidence with the work they have done so far, believing that it should give them an advantage for 2023. He added: "I don't want to go into too much detail because it's something that we've worked very hard on to understand and hopefully will give us an advantage into next year, so I don't want to say anything that will potentially benefit our rivals. "But at the end of the day every single car is different. I have to say I mentioned a couple of times this year that I thought we understood our car and were on the right track, but we have been set back with a couple of issues that we weren't expecting." Many of the W13's problems stem from the porpoising and drag, which is more prominent on the car because of the radical design concept the team went with in 2022. Russell doesn't expect there to be any further issues that hinder their performance on track in the final four races of the season. "I think we've had enough races now, that we've gone through so many different scenarios, I can't really imagine there's going to be another one that catches us by surprise," he explained. "We've had the porpoising issues, we've had the ride issues, we've had the car touching the ground and damaging the floor, we've had so many different issues and we believe now that we've got a direction that we need to head in."
Most read
