What Does George Russell Feel About The 2024 Car?

In his first ever season at his current Mercedes team George Russell proved a strong point. He showed both critics and fans alike that he wasn’t at the Toto Wolff-led Mercedes stable to be Lewis Hamilton’s wingman or the second-in-command, so to speak.

Past reputations forged in similar fashion have unfortunately clung to drivers like Valtteri Bottas, formerly with Mercedes AMG Petronas team but currently with the newly-branded Stake F1 team.

Although, with George Russell a thing was clear and evidently so. It was that the King’s Lynn-born driver was in no way whatsoever going to be Lewis Hamilton’s pillion rider. Few have driven with a zeal and purpose in their maiden season alongside the seven-time world champion as George Russell.

It was back in the 2022 F1 season where George Russell scored no fewer than 275 points, which was 35 points more than the sport’s most successful driver ever: Lewis Hamilton. That in effect, the young Englishman beat his compatriot, a far more experienced driver in just his maiden season in the highest annals of the sport was a far more compelling narrative than waxing lyrical about any other driver celebrated with usual gusto.

What a feeling must that have been for Russell, who the following year would see Hamilton fighting back and scoring more points than the Mercedes newcomer.

Remember, it’s been just two seasons for George Russell at Mercedes and he seems to have fit nicely at the Woking-based outfit. He was pressing for the charge at the recent Singapore Grand Prix of 2023, where in the closing stages, it was quite evident that Russell had more race pace than the eventual winner Carlos Sainz. Alas, Russell binned that chance, though not at the fault of the car, but perhaps out of a sense of restlessness, the kind of error he’d love to avoid in the brand new season.

George Russell on Mercedes’ forthcoming challenger

But a driver also needs a handy machine to be able to win and while Russell has tasted victory already with Mercedes, what are the chances of him having a decent competitive machine for the next season, due to begin sometime later this year?

George Russell had some lucid answers to offer in that direction and would add, “Working on the new [W15] concept for a long time and there’s been so much due diligence gone into that concept. Whereas I think last year it was all a little bit rushed. We didn’t have all the information to hand, we may have jumped to a couple of conclusions without thoroughly going through the consequences. And we learned when the car hit the ground this year that we made a step forward in some regards, but it came with a lot of baggage and we hadn’t taken that into consideration. So, I think we’ve done a great job to truly understand what we need. We’ve obviously had a further 12 months’ experience to further understand the car and what brings the performance.”

That being told, George Russell also opened up on the Red Bull dominance so far and had some interesting insights to share about his Mercedes team’s current spate of competitiveness and what could be expected this year with reference to what had gone wrong in 2023.

He would add:
 
“I think last year we put all our eggs in one basket and that wasn’t a basket that provided the performance we were expecting. [But], the fact is we’ve got to close a huge gap.  The Red Bull dominance this year is probably the greatest – I think statistically it is the most dominant car ever, so we’ve all got a huge task on our hands.”