Mercedes has made a lot of progress with the difficult W13 in recent weeks, and Russell believes the team can now start thinking about fighting for wins in every race, something they have yet to achieve.
In the long term, he believes the lessons learned from all the hard work after this rough start will pay off.
“I really think we will be in contention for wins in the second half of the season,” he said when asked by Motorsport.com if this year was comparable to 2009, when Lewis Hamilton and McLaren turned an initially uncompetitive car into a winner. .
“We’re making tremendous progress right now. I think as a team we have a lot to be desired, and there was always a lot of motivation and fire within this team to bridge that gap.”
“But I think now that we’re a stone’s throw away there’s even more. And I think the suffering we’ve been through earlier this year will probably pay off going into next year, because other teams haven’t dealt with the problems that we’ve been through. we have had.”
“And they can fall into those traps later in the development process. So yeah, we sure have a lot to be optimistic about.”
At Paul Ricard on Thursday, Hamilton suggested that thanks to his problems with the W13, the Mercedes team had “sharpened its tools” and would therefore be in better shape overall when it gets a better car in future.
George Russell agreed that the Brackley outfit had learned from adversity this season.
“Yes, without a doubt,” he said. “I think life is always easier when everything is going well. And sometimes things go wrong when you have a fast car, because you don’t have to worry about some of the smaller details because when you’re winning, you think everything is great. “.
“And even the Williams guys said something similar about when they came back in 2014, during the qualifying sessions, not even engaging high power mode at the start of Q1, just putting the engine away.
“And they could make some little mistakes but they were still there, almost nothing was wrong with them.”
“Whereas now we feel like we have to get absolutely everything out there to be four-tenths of the guys at the front.”
“For sure, I think it’s going to make us a stronger team, a stronger driver, but on the other hand, teams like Ferrari and Red Bull have been through this for the last eight years. So it goes both ways.
Russell insists the team now has a better handle on the W13 than before.
“I feel like as a team this is probably the first time in the last few races that we’ve really gotten to know the car and what we think we need to do to bring more performance.
“While looking back at the first six races of the season, it was almost trial and error, we were still really understanding what the issues were.
“And we didn’t have a clear direction, or we didn’t really know as a team the direction we needed to go. Whereas now we feel pretty confident that at least we have a channel to follow.”
“Whether we can translate it into performance is another matter, but at least now we feel like we have a clear direction.”
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