(Motorsport) Mercedes driver George Russell is confident that the Silver Arrows will be back in contention for the top honours next season, revealing that the team are working on a new “philosophy” for their 2023 car design. The team, by their own high standards have had an extremely disappointing 2022 season so far, failing to win a single race and falling further behind Ferrari in the Constructors Standings after a poor weekend in Singapore. With just five races to go, Mercedes have shifted their attention to the 2023 season already and George Russell is adamant that his team are on the right path.

We have a philosophy that we're going to be trying to adopt in our development and I'm very confident that is the correct one, but equally, it doesn't mean that we can necessarily achieve it," said Russell. “We have a target, and that is a massive positive in itself. We know what we're chasing, we have a clear target we're trying to chase now. Can we achieve that? I have every confidence that we can. We obviously don't know how much our rivals are going to improve over this winter, but I definitely have confidence that we will have a more complete car across the circuit range going into 2023." 

The 2022 pre-season saw a lot of eyebrows being raised as Mercedes’ W13 car featured no sidepods, a design strategy that no other Formula 1 team on the grid had adopted. The risk did not pay off and the car has suffered innumerable problems throughout the season, the most notable one being ‘porpoising’ where the W13 would violently move up and down at high speeds, making it difficult for the drivers to control the car. However, Russell believes that Mercedes might once again go in a different design strategy for the 2023 car design.

“It's data driven, to be honest. We do a lot of analysis on the races we've been competitive, the races we've been slow, and trying to understand why that was and I think we've managed to gain quite a grasp onto that and understand why at certain circuits we were so much more competitive than others," he said. “We've only managed to learn that over the course of these races and I think that triple-header after the summer break was quite telling for us, with our performance between the low-downforce and high-downforce circuits. I don't want to go into too much detail because it's something that we've worked very hard on to understand and hopefully will give us an advantage next year, so I don't want to say anything that will potentially benefit our rivals. 

“But at the end of the day every single car is different. I have to say I mentioned a couple of times this year that I thought we understood our car and were on the right track, but we have been set back with a couple of issues that we weren't expecting. But I think we've had enough races now, that we've gone through so many different scenarios, I can't really imagine there's going to be another one that catches us by surprise. We've had the porpoising issues, we've had the ride issues, we've had the car touching the ground and damaging the floor, we've had so many different issues and we believe now that we've got a direction that we need to head in."

The 24 year old has dismissed claims that the team was complacent in the development of the 2022 car, leading to struggles throughout the season. Russell said “I think not being complacent has been a massive factor in the team's success for so long. I found it pretty inspiring to see when we brought this new concept to the car for 2022, with the sort of no-sidepod philosophy, even though, obviously, retrospectively now it hasn't necessarily worked out for us this season, it showed an attitude within this team that it doesn't matter how much success they've had, they're still willing to push the boundaries. I think that gives me confidence moving into the future because you have to make these bold decisions sometimes, and sometimes they go against you, but sometimes they don't. And if you are just complacent, settling for an easy route, you're never going to win, so I think if that attitude is maintained, we're pushing the boundaries." 

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