SportF1Russell doesn't think Mercedes can do Copse in depth

Russell doesn't think Mercedes can do Copse in depth

George Russell joined Mercedes in 2022, after three years at Williams, but has spent the first part of this season working with the team to try to alleviate his problems with the car, especially those related to the rebound of the car.

With the new regulations this year, several teams have had this problem of porpoising (rebound), and Mercedes has been one of the most affected teams.

This problem has limited Mercedes to just five podium finishes in the first nine races, leaving it behind Red Bull and Ferrari in the constructors’ championship ahead of this weekend’s British Grand Prix.

Mercedes took a step forward with its porpoising issue when it brought an update to the Spanish Grand Prix in May, allowing the team to unlock more performance from its car, although Russell and team-mate Lewis Hamilton continued to struggle with the bounce of the car in the curves.

“Everything caught us by surprise when we went to Barcelona, and we had no problems with porpoising on the straight, but then we got to the corners, the two high-speed turns 3 and 9, and the car was bouncing around the corners,” Russell told Motorsport.com.

“If you listen to our onboard during qualifying or Ferrari, you hear like ‘crash, crash, crash’ in the middle of the curve itself at turn 3 and turn 9. That was 250 km / h, and Copse is done at 300km/h”, explained the Briton from Mercedes about the famous Silverstone curve, which is practically treated as the extension of the straight that precedes it.

“So it’s not going to be an easy thing to manage. But I think there will be multiple teams in the same [porpoising] boat.”

Russell noted that last year he was able to go flat out for Copse from early practice in his car, the Williams FW44 , which was one of the slowest on the grid.

“I’m pretty sure I won’t be doing that this year, even though we have quite a bit more downforce at high speed,” Russell said.

Although the young Brit said it felt “horrible from inside the car” in Barcelona’s high-speed corners, Mercedes was the fastest team through this complex, which he called “pretty intriguing”.

Mercedes will bring further updates to the British Grand Prix in a bid to improve its form, arriving in time for Russell and Hamilton’s home race at Silverstone.

George Russell, Mercedes

For his part, Red Bull boss Christian Horner said Mercedes could be a key factor in the fight for the front of the grid by returning to a more traditional track like Silverstone after struggling to be competitive. on street circuits in Monaco , Azerbaijan and Canada .

But Russell felt that as long as the team continues to find and fix problems with its car, changing the track’s specification was no guarantee of success.

“I think we’ve always known it has a lot of potential,” the driver said of the Mercedes W13.

“We are just realizing now that the last three races have taken us by surprise, in the sense that they are very different to Barcelona, and they are all very similar.”

“All three street circuits are very bumpy and they all have low speed corners. So if you have a car that is competitive in the low speed corners and one that is really robust over the bumps and the curbs, you are going to be quick on all three. events”.

“Now, we go to Silverstone, we go to Austria, Paul Ricard, Budapest – they are more traditional circuits, as such,” he said, referring to the differences between the tracks. “But the facts are that we are discovering different problems with our package at every track we go to.”

“So there’s no guarantee that we’re going to rampage when we get there.”

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