The German producer endured one other difficult weekend in China the place the promise of a second place within the dash with Lewis Hamilton was not adopted by means of to the primary grand prix.
Russell got here house in sixth, with Hamilton down in ninth, because the squad was as soon as once more left chasing solutions about why it can’t unlock the potential it feels there may be in its W15 automotive.
And with main arrange route modifications for each drivers after the Saturday dash failing to ship any final enchancment in potential, the workforce concedes there may be nonetheless a component of thriller about what’s going on.
Workforce boss Toto Wolff stated: “I believe the automotive is a troublesome automotive to arrange and troublesome to drive, and that’s the reason you’ve these oscillations in performances, for my part.
“I believe the place the automotive is, and the place Lewis’s automotive was, was definitely distant from the optimum and it’s driving on a knife-edge.
“So, what’s it? That is the place we’re. For Miami we’re bringing new bits, and it is going to be fascinating to see how they’ll carry out on the automotive.”
Russell means that the best way that main set-up modifications over the China weekend didn’t yield a lot distinction in efficiency factors to the truth that Mercedes might have to just accept that the automotive is delivering all that it’s able to proper now.
“We have had two totally different set-ups this weekend, each of which produced very related lap instances and efficiency,” stated Russell.
“So, the work must be again on the manufacturing facility and in the end in F1, the extra downforce you’ve, the sooner you will go. The set-up is the cherry on the cake.”
From Russell’s perspective, Mercedes wants to maneuver away from evaluation of discovering an ideal set-up and return to the extra commonplace strategy of specializing in aggressive improvement and a run of upgrades.
“I believe there isn’t a silver bullet,” he defined. “We simply must carry on including efficiency and specializing in the fundamentals, which is within the wind tunnel and within the CFD: simply including downforce. Possibly generally it is so simple as that.”
Russell stated that a lot experimentation and route change had taken place all through the bottom impact period to choose what the workforce has now that maybe it had reached a ceiling on what is feasible with its present tools.
“I believe we have understood sufficient to this point that we simply want so as to add downforce,” he defined. “We have modified philosophies and we have modified ideas fairly just a few instances now during the last two years.
“My private view is that it doesn’t matter what idea you are on, you simply must have as a lot downforce as doable, and you will cope with the restrictions thereafter.
“So yeah, let’s examine in Miami. We have some upgrades coming to the automotive. Let’s examine what we are able to do with that.”