Russell: Mercedes looking back on glory years for inspiration

Indeed, as Red Bull are doing right now, Mercedes have dominated Formula 1 between 2014 and 2020, their stranglehold on the Championship partially broken when Max Verstappen beat Lewis Hamilton to the Drivers' Crown that year, while Mercedes took an unprecedented eighth Constructors' Title.

However, the team got their sums wrong with the W13, their first car built under the current ground effect F1 aero regulations, and have been playing catch up - without any major success - to Red Bull who nailed the rules.

Mercedes debuted a radical slim sidepod concept in 2022, which turned out to be a complete failure, and against all logic stuck with it at the start of the 2023 F1 season until Monaco when they unleashed a B-Spec W14 with regular sidepods. That followed a technical shakeup within the team as James Allison took a hands-on role while Mile Elliott was sidelined.

The updates Mercedes W14 seemed to be an improvement at start, but turned out to be inconsistent in its performances, as in Spa-Francorchamps, it was bouncing like its predecessor infamously did during 2022.

Reflecting on that George Russell, who finished sixth in last Sunday's Grand Prix, told Motorsport.com: "I think this weekend's validated that probably the direction we've taken with the set-up in recent races hasn't been the right one.

We suffered with a huge amount of bouncing today," he added. "A number of teams did, maybe not as severe as we did."

And instead of pointing the blame to where it should be regarding the bouncing, Russell blamed the sport instead of Mercedes for the W14's shortcomings, as Red Bull have no issues with bouncing, a benchmark Mercedes should aspire to.

"Still obviously a bit of a shame to see that as a sport at the pinnacle the majority of teams are still struggling with bouncing. I hope something can be solved in that regard in the future," Russell said.

Asked whether a setup change could improve matters, he responded: "Yeah, definitely can be tweaked. I think we're working really hard on the characteristics for next year.

"We're looking a lot at how the previous generations of cars were for Mercedes during the glory years, and using that as a bit of inspiration, as clearly that was one of the best cars in history. So that's given us some pointers on where we need to try and aim for," he explained.

While Russell has been the faster Mercedes driver in 2022, a rejuvenated Hamilton has been consistently beating him recently, as the younger Briton has even been showing a tendency to commit errors.

Assessing his season so far he said: "A season of two halves. So, I'd say the first six races were really strong. The last six races not so much. A few ideas why that is, quite a lot of missed opportunities this season for various reasons.

"Some from mistakes of my own, some like the failure in Australia cost me a lot of points. But nevertheless, if you're not fighting for the P1 in the drivers’ championship, you just want to maximise the constructors’, and so far we're kind of doing that.

"I'm sure we're going to be strong in the second half of the season. And we've got some little things coming in after the break.

"But I'm confident we can sort of secure the second best team [position], and try and close that gap further," the winner of the 2021 Sao Paulo Grand Prix concluded.

Russell currently sits sixth in the 2023 F1 Drivers' Championship with 99 points while Hamilton is fourth with 148. Mercedes are second in the Constructors' Championship, 256 points behind Red Bull.