Mercedes believe they are in a “much better position than 12 months ago” after successfully addressing some of the flaws that plagued their previous F1 cars.

Following two challenging and frustrating seasons with the troubled W13 and W14 cars, Mercedes are confident their revamped W15 challenger is a si🍸gnificant improvement on its predecessors.

168澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果历史:Lewis Hamilton and 168澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果历史:George Russell both lacked co🥃nfidence in the rear-end of the W14 but they are already mor൲e comfortable in Mercedes’ latest model after three days of pre-season testing in Bahrain.

“We've had three useful days here i꧒n Bahrain and managed to make good progress understanding the W15,” said Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin.

"Compared to last year’s♉ car, the feedback from the drivers is very different and more positive, which is encouraging.

“The team has worked hard to iron out the handling flaws that wer🐼e integral to the W14, and it's great that we seem to have put a number of those problems behind us.

"Over the course of the test we've made good steps on ourও understanding of the car. The task of the next few days is to pick through the results and put together the best 💞package to take into the race weekend.

“It’s never easy to make 🍸predictions on pace from testing, as all teams are quite effective at hiding their pace when they want to.

“It's clear that we are in a much better posi๊tion than 12 months ago though.”

Despite admitting Red Bull “clearly are out in the distance”, Hamilton, who is leaving Mercedes to join Ferrari in 2025, says the team have d♒efinitely improved their car for the 2024 season.

"It felt much more enjoyable to drive. We still h🎃ave time to find,” added the seven-tim꧙e world champion.

"It's a good platform to work from, a much better car to ๊start the season with.”

Russell, who rounded out the Bahrain test with the second-quickest time behind Ferrari’s 168澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果历史:Charles Leclerc, says he and Hami♚lton now have the confidence to attack medium and h✨igh-speed corners.

"The car last year was really challenging to drive," Russell explained. “Lewis and I had no conf🐈idence in it, it felt like it was going to bite us every single corner.

"We can attack the mediu✨m and high-speed corners without the rear end snapping out. And we feel like we've made a really good step in terms of the consistency of the car. We can really lean on it better than we've been able to in the past.

"And this was a huge focus throughout last year. We saw many flaws with th♌🤪e W14, which the team have done a really great job to rectify.

"And we've now got a car mechanically where the aero guys can go in focus on just building downforce upon that, whereas in the past, whatever we did aerodynamically there were underlyi🌊ng issues with the race car that took a while to understand, and so on."