French GP: George Russell gives promising Mercedes update as team gets to grips with car

George Russell says that Mercedes are feeling confident they now know how to get the best out of the car better than they have at any other point of the season.

The British driver has had a decent campaign this year despite Mercedes’ struggles at times, and will be hoping that their recent signs of improvement are indicators that the second half of the season is going to be a success relatively speaking.

Indeed, when talking to the press here in France on Thursday, he revealed that he felt the team was getting to grips now with the car and had a much better understanding of what they need to do to keep improving it.

“I feel like as a team this is probably the first time in recent races where we’ve really got on top of the car and what we believe we need to do to bring more performance whereas if we look back at the first six races of the season it was almost trial and error, we were still really understanding what the problems were and we didn’t have a clear direction we had to take.

“Now we feel pretty confident we’ve at least got a channel to follow. Whether we can now translate that into performance is another question but at least now we feel as though we have a clear direction.”