George Russell is hopeful that Mercedes can compete with Ferrari and Red Bull Racing for the world title next season. The Briton saw the German formation make great strides in 2022 and therefore expects that with the same work ethic, the team can advance even further a year later.
The formation dominated Formula 1 for years, but last calendar year's performance went down a lot. Partly due to problems with porpoising, Mercedes fell behind its two rivals and had to fight for podium places. However, that was by no means easy.
Russell trusts potential Mercedes
It recovered over the course of the season, even celebrating a victory in the Brazilian Grand Prix in the closing stages of the race year. Speaking to Crash.net, Russell stressed that the team is definitely not there yet, but the win proves its potential. Future success will therefore depend on rapid development of the car.
"I am pretty confident if we do achieve that, we will have a car that we can compete with Red Bull," the Briton told the Medium. "The rate of development, I’ve got every hope that we can definitely fight for the championship next year."
I have no doubt they will compete on top. FIA has granted enough favours to Mercedes to ensure a 3 way battle. In a way its exciting, but FIA has lost its credibility by hugely favouring Mercedes and tainting the sport.
Not possible. Redbull and Ferrari are a year ahead in development race. They will be close but not enough to beat Redbull and Ferrari.
Merc engine is also lacking in power. How are they going to make up for that under freeze unless ofcourse FIA steps in as usual.
In the past MB could lack in aero, and simply blitz everyone with hp, now the others caught up with hp and they have good aero,
On hp they can’t do much because of the freeze, fixing aero and get on top of the others will be expensive and then you have the cost cap
So they will need to call a few favours from uncle FIA
In 2022 MB lost test time by not starting with the “real” car in the shake down, so in the pre season test the rock up with the zero design on to get huge porpoising, that design was based on the premise that they need to run the car very low to get best performance(Toto’s words) but they had to raise it to get rid of porpoising, losing performance, so the manipulated the FIA to raise the ride height for all teams.
So it took them a long time to get the car “sorted” my view is that they were still the 3rd and close to the 4th fastest by the end of the year.
This after the 2 top teams started to work on 2023 cars, so to think they can be in a title fight this year? The other teams have a good base car to continue develop and MB had to start from scratch, and remember the new ride height, front wing banned and cost cap of which they spend last year to get the car better, remember they don’t have unlimited budgets as in the past
So it’s going to be difficult
And I hope it will be you leading MB again Russell.....you deserve it
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