Russell: Nothing telling Mercedes it cannot fight for F1 title in 2023 George Russell sees nothing that points to Mercedes not being able to make the step it needs to fight for the Formula 1 world championship in 2023. George is young and hopeful and needs a few more wins to have a 'career' lol. The RedBull was beyond dominant. I dont see Mercedes coming close to equal the deficit to RedBull and exceeding it to win. Thats not how this looks at all. They won Brazil after RedBull fouled their setup. Not really about Mercedes being in a state of advancement. They were not nearly as quick at Yas vs Brazil. Focus on your competition with LH and improve your qualy George. LH was superior to you in the last half of the season. You did not at all defeat LH in such a manner as to think he is less than you now. You need better qualy and a larger margin to see him off. Good luck. Fighting RedBull is another saga in itself given how strong they were. The battle in the garage will be interesting of course for us fans.
Through difficulty one can yield improvement and innovation-- https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/how-mercedes-w13-struggles-prompted-factory-rethink/10418909/ How Mercedes W13 struggles prompted factory rethink Mercedes' director of trackside engineering has outlined how his team's efforts to address the W13's various problems during the 2022 Formula 1 season led to it investing in new design tools. By:Alex Kalinauckas Jan 10, 2023, 5:30 PM Mercedes' 2022 challenger has gone down as its worst since it became a regular title-winning force at the start of the V6 hybrid era in 2014, with the first Silver Arrow since 2019 most closely associated with the porpoising problem that impacted all F1 squads in the first season of the championship's return to ground-effects regulations. After the team discovered the severity of its porpoising problem at the second 2022 pre-season test, Mercedes realised it needed to upgrade its design tools so future updates could address the aerodynamic issues causing porpoising. "The way that we're working, the way that we're assessing developments on the car – that is what we've been investing in," director of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin told Autosport at the end of the 2022 season. "And that investment has meant that the car that we [were] racing on track is perhaps not as quick as it would've been if we'd gone flat out with our development heads on. "But it was very much a case of trying to crack the code of what was happening with these cars aerodynamically. "And, once we could understand that, development-wise it is a bit like 'the lights have suddenly come on again and we can see where we're going and we know what we want chase for future performance'." It is understood that Mercedes' efforts to improve its design tools were concentrated on making its CFD systems more efficient so they could better model the porpoising problem that had been – per team technical director Mike Elliott – "computationally very expensive" during the initial phase of the W13's conception. "The issue wasn't so much our windtunnel but there was a mechanism at play that we hadn't captured in any of our modelling or any of our work and that was the porpoising mechanism," Shovlin explained. "So, there were two things you had to do. One is that you've got to engineer it out of the car. "Which was, at the time [during the opening races of the 2022 season], fairly painful from a point of view of the distraction, the finite resource that we've got in a cost cap in the aero department that had to funnel into understanding the problem. "[That was] some very fundamental and relatively basic work, just trying to work out work actually was going on. "And then, subsequently [work out]: how do you develop the tools that you need to be able to get back to where we were?' "Where we could just commit to making a set of parts, bring them to the car and have confidence that they work." Mercedes' efforts to upgrade its design tools eventually led it to produce the floor and front wing updates that were respectively introduced at the Spanish and US Grand Prix events. The first initially eliminated its aerodynamic porpoising issue but revealed an additional problem with car stiffness that had to be additionally addressed. Eventually, the W13 became a winner through George Russell in the Brazilian GP, two races on from the Austin update being introduced.
Wolff: New Hamilton F1 deal will be sorted in a "few hours" Mercedes boss Toto Wolff thinks it will take him and Lewis Hamilton just a "few hours" and a bit of "wrestling" to sort out a fresh Formula 1 contract.
Would think this is realistic- Mercedes W14 may be no closer to Red Bull at start of 2023, says Wolff Mercedes boss Toto Wolff insists his squad remains cautious about its Formula 1 hopes for 2023, and is even braced for not having closed the gap to Red Bull yet.
F1 can't find no other interesting drivers for the sport, so they try and keep Hamilton around. Other drivers are boring robots. As far as driving, he has nothing left to prove.
RUMOR UPDATE: So that's 70 million EUROS per year for 2 years. That's without bonuses. He also wants 250 million EUROS should he retire.
Mercedes are masters at throwing sand in your eyes, I don't really trust anything they say anymore. I expect them to be dominant again, they didn't just forget how to build a good car.
Time will tell. They already had lost ground in 2021, got wrong the regulation change... I see a downward tendency there.
