George Russell praised the evolution of the W13, but reiterated that more focus is needed on the car to understand the current performance
Mercedes achieved its best result of the season at the French GP, with Lewis Hamilton and George Russell finishing on the podium. Obviously, it's a positive result for a team that has suffered from many problems throughout the season. But the #63 also warned about the upgrades: they are necessary, but you have to understand the package they have right now.
"When you're so far off the pace, you want to try everything you can to try to close that gap," Russell said. "Maybe that's a lesson for us. We need to focus on ourselves and really try to focus on getting the most out of the car, rather than testing too much," he added.
"But we need to experiment at the moment to see what works and what doesn't. It's a bit complicated at the moment," he added.
The Germans took major updates at the British GP two stages ago. Although they still suffer from the kicks, they seem to have fewer incidents, which is already a good step forward for the Silver Arrows. In addition, there have been five podiums in the last five races, which makes the young Brit optimistic.
"I think we are definitely optimistic because we feel we have a direction to go and we think we will make good progress," he analyzed.
"Qualifying is the day when you have the clearest comparison with your rivals, and it's clearly a bit difficult when we see how far off pole we were. But [the race] is where we need to understand, I think we have a faster car than we had halfway through this season," he closed.