The first half of the 2022 season was difficult for Mercedes. They went from being the clear dominators of the category to having problems standing up to Ferrari and Red Bull, especially due to the recurring porpoising in their W13.
However, recent races have seen an improvement in form, with at least one of its two drivers on the podium in the last six rounds, culminating in double podium finishes for George Russell and Lewis Hamilton in France and Hungary.
The Hungaroring also saw Russell’s first Formula 1 pole position and, after leading the opening stages of the race, the young Briton finished third behind Max Verstappen and Hamilton.
Asked by Motorsport.com if the team’s recent improvement in form was enough to justify sticking with the same concept car for the rest of the year, Russell was unclear if a change could have a significant impact.
“I don’t think changing the concept of the car is going to make us go faster, quite the opposite to be honest,” Russell confessed after the Hungarian race. “Sometimes you just have to trust the process and keep pushing.”
“And that’s hard to do when you’re out of your groove and things don’t seem to be going your way. But personally, I believe in every single person on our team, and I think, at the moment, we’re making great progress.” .
“We have seen it with the work we have done [in qualifying], you have seen it with the pace that both of us have shown [in the race]. I think that at the beginning of the season, we finished the races one minute behind the winner. The last two races, we’ve been within 10 seconds.
“So I think we’re definitely going in the right direction.”
Many teams have chosen to change the concept of their single-seaters to follow the Ferrari or Red Bull approach, but Mercedes has insisted on its virtually non-existent sidepod design, which turned heads from early pre-season testing.
The team has said on previous occasions that it doubted that abandoning the concept would change its level in the 2022 season, but that they were studying “combinations of different concepts” for next year.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff felt that the difficulties the team had in practice in France and Hungary helped him find the right direction for the car, allowing it to be more competitive.
“It was a difficult weekend in general, because the suffering on Friday [in Hungary] was huge when we didn’t really know which way to go,” said Wolff. “Maybe the fact that we were so wrong on Friday helped us to be very, almost completely right on Sunday.”
“We have a lot of data to look at, a lot of positives from the last weekend in France and here [in Hungary], and to build on for the second half of the season.”
With additional reporting by Matt Kew
