George Russell says Mercedes needs to get back to basics and simply add more downforce to its car to try an improve performance after a poor start to the season.
Mercedes has scored a best finish of fifth place — achieved by Russell in the Bahrain Grand Prix — so far this season, and is currently fourth in the constructors’ championship. With McLaren comfortably ahead of Mercedes at this stage in third, Russell says the different routes his team has taken in terms of car design show that a more simple approach is needed.
“I think we’ve understood enough so far that we just need to add downforce,” Russell said. “We’ve changed philosophies, we’ve changed concepts quite a few times now over the last two years.
“My personal view is no matter what concept you’re on, you just need to have as much downforce as possible and you’ll deal with the limitations thereafter. In Miami we’ve got some upgrades coming to the car — let’s see what we can achieve.
“I think there is no silver bullet and we need to just keep adding performance and focusing on the basics, which is in the wind tunnel and in the CFD just adding downforce. Maybe sometimes it’s as simple as that.”
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Russell bases his thinking on the way the Chinese Grand Prix weekend panned out for Mercedes, as he says he made significant changes to his car’s setup through the various sessions and still ended up with similar performance.
“I think it would have been the same — that’s good learning in itself,” he said. “We’ve had two different setups (in China), both of which produced pretty similar lap time and performance. So the work needs to be back at the factory. Ultimately in Formula 1, the more downforce you have the faster you will go — the setup is just the cherry on the cake.
“The fact is Red Bull are still a long way ahead of everybody. I think it was only in the Sprint race that we really saw their true potential, [Max] Verstappen pulling a second on everybody, comfortable. So we shouldn’t kid ourselves. We’ve got of course a lot of work that we need to do to close that gap with them and get in the fight with Ferrari and Lando [Norris].”