F1 | Russell: “The W15 seems easier to drive”

After filming for the first time in Bahrain earlier in the week during a filming day following the Silverstone shakedown, Russell debuted the W15 in the official Sakhir test. The Briton had the whole day available to familiarize himself with the new car and tomorrow he will hand over the wheel to teammate Lewis Hamilton, who will then return to the cockpit on Friday morning.

Although the day ended in a modest twelfth place, Mercedes clearly wasn't focused on setting times, but rather on set-up changes and accumulating as much data as possible. As with many other teams, in the morning the program for Russell began with short runs of a few laps, in which the aerodynamic measurements with rakes were completed, given that for Mercedes too this is a fairly important change in philosophy compared to last year.

Although already in 2023 the W14 had been directed towards the Red Bull concept with the update package introduced in Monaco, in fact the single-seater still had clear limitations due to the fact that it was conceived and designed to work with another philosophy. With the W15, however, we started from a blank sheet of paper, trying to also remedy those defects highlighted several times by the drivers in the past world championship, including excessive sensitivity of the car and behavior that is not always easy to predict.

Precisely from this point of view, Russell's first feedback seems positive, because according to the Briton the new W15 seems to have freed itself from that “nervous” character that had often caught the drivers off guard in 2023, so much so as to make them protagonists of an often fluctuating season .

Speaking at the end of the day, Russell said: “Overall, the W15 is more enjoyable to drive than last year's car. But we know it's not about feel, it's about speed. However, today was about learning and not chasing performance. We are focused on ourselves in this test, and only next week will we see how we stack up compared to the others.”

With 121 laps under his belt, second only to Verstappen in terms of mileage, Russell felt Mercedes' testing was off to a solid start, especially after opting to carry out a long-distance simulation in the evening.

In fact, the afternoon session was divided into two sections: in the first hour of activity on the track the Briton completed three runs on the C3 of five laps each, in order to evaluate set-up changes, such as in terms of heights from the ground. After an hour spent in the pits, from 5pm local time Russell began to clock up lap after lap, completing three separate long stints on three different compounds, in what proved to be a first attempt at race simulation. Nineteen laps on the C3, seventeen on the C2 (with one of the two sets of this compound available for the whole weekend) and another nineteen on the C1, the hardest compound in the entire range.

George Russell, Mercedes F1 W15

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

“Since we started, we felt like we had a good base to build from. We completed a lot of laps and have a lot of data to analyze tonight. We ended the day in a reasonably good position and can build from here over the next couple of days,” Russell explained at the end of the day.

“We will focus on maximizing learning mileage rather than finding a sweet spot with the car.”

Speaking earlier in the day in the press conference dedicated to the Team Principals, Toto Wolff explained how the priority was precisely to improve the handling during the development phase of the new car, in order to guarantee greater confidence to the drivers: “We had a car that was difficult to manage and sometimes it was difficult to understand why it did what it did. I think that was the goal for this season: to have a stable platform from which to develop. Let's see if we succeeded.”