“I’m much more confident than I have been in recent years,” says George Russell, looking ahead to 2025 – What he thinks is making Mercedes’ prospects better
The 2024 Formula One season was another challenging time for Mercedes. After already struggling with fundamental problems in 2022 and 2023, the team did not seem to have been able to reach its full potential last season either.
For the upcoming season, however, George Russell is cautiously optimistic: “To be honest, I think it will be a significant change this year.”
“Every year, we’ve uncovered a problem, solved it, and created a new one,” the Briton reflects. ‘But we’ve probably been much more disciplined this time with every change we’ve made, and more thorough than ever.’
He says the work in the simulator has been particularly intensive, to ensure that unexpected problems do not arise again and ‘we don’t fall into a new trap’.
In this context, Russell explicitly praises his driver colleagues at Mercedes: “We have some really great simulator drivers who show a lot of commitment. We are well positioned. Kimi has also done a really good job.”
What set Mercedes back so long
One key obstacle in recent years was the so-called bouncing phenomenon, which particularly affected Mercedes in 2022. Russell recalls that it took around 18 months to fix this problem. It was only after that that it became apparent that there were other structural weaknesses with the car.
“We realized that we had a small problem with the suspension. We changed the suspension. That caused a balance problem,“ explains Russell, adding: ‘These things simply take time. When something then ’clicks’ and works, sometimes you don’t know exactly why.”
Russell is confident about 2025, though. He emphasizes that Mercedes has now developed a much more forward-looking approach.
“In recent years, we have been so focused on solving one problem that we have not considered what new difficulties this could create,” he admits. “It’s like solving one thing and then creating a new problem. So we have been much more forward thinking than we have been in the past.“
”If you change the characteristics of the car, how it drives and how it feels for us, if you make the front end stronger, then it is at the expense of the rear end. So I think we really need to be thorough.”
