George Russell has revealed that the current “limitations” of the Mercedes W14 are “totally different” to what the team faced 12 months ago.
Mercedes’ difficult start to the 2024 F1 season continued in Miami with both of their cars failing to finish in the points in the sprint race.
In grand prix qualifying, Russell and Lewis Hamilton could only manage seventh and eighth respectively.
More worryingly for Mercedes, they were around eight-tenths off Max Verstappen’s pole time.
Reflecting on Mercedes’ mediocre level of performance, Russell shed light on how the team “over compensated” with this year’s car development when trying to fix the issues which plagued the 2023 car.
“The fact is the stopwatch doesn’t lie,” he said. “We know that probably some of the changes we’ve made since the end of last year perhaps over compensated with some of the development items we did.
“We have limitations with the car now which is a totally different to what we had this time 12 months ago. We have so much work to solve the problems. We’ve gone too far in that direction. We know we need to improve. We need to improve quickly.”
Mercedes had introduced a significant upgrade package for this weekend, which included a new floor, with further updates on the way at Imola.
George Russell (GBR) Mercedes AMG F1 on the grid. Formula 1 World…
Russell remains adamant Mercedes know how to turn things around but it won’t happen quickly.
“We definitely know how to,” he added. “When we look at the data we understand why we’re in the position we are right now. As i said last year, we understood why we were in that same position.
“I think unfortunately we’ve over compensated to solve the problems of last year. We’ve gone from this extreme to that extreme now so we’ve got to rewind and find ourselves in a halfway house.
“When development, when new upgrades take eight weeks to bring to the car you learn this problem race one, race two, you can’t just bring an upgrade to the next race.”
Looking ahead to Sunday’s race, Russell remains confident of making a “step forward” for the race.
“I expect to be looking forward tomorrow, hopefully no pressure from behind,” he explained. “P7 and P8, we have to accept as well that is where we are at the moment.
“We are a step behind McLaren and Ferrari, a big step behind Red Bull. I think the result today was the maximum. I am confident we will make a step forward tomorrow.”