Lewis Hamilton may not get the Mercedes performance jump he desperately craves after a gloomy review of the changes by team-mate George Russell.
The Silver Arrows have been off the pace again so far this season with the two drivers simply scraping together as many points as they can. The same was true last weekend in Miami, as both climbed several places in the race to finish ahead of one Ferrari each.
But the fact remains they are a long way off the pace of runaway leaders Red Bull and are unable to compete for wins as a result. After the Azerbaijan race last month, Hamilton said he was "counting down the days" until upgrades for his car are ready.
Those modifications are expected to be on at least one of the Mercedes cars for the next race, at Imola. They will be hoping it makes a notable difference to their speed on track and brings them at least a bit closer to the runaway leaders in terms of performance.
Having tested the new upgrades on the simulator, though, Russell warned fans not to expect miracles. "There is a lot of expectation around Imola but everyone is moving forwards and bringing upgrades," he told the F1 Nation podcast.
"I'd like to think it can transform things, but this is F1. It's never that straightforward. I have driven with the new upgrades in the sim, but the sim is not reality. Don't expect the world to change at Imola. Red Bull are still going to be the quickest. At the end of the day, I don't care where we are, we're chasing them and we want to beat them."
And team boss Toto Wolff has also played down the effect the upgrades are expected to have on his team. The Austrian said: "We need to manage our own expectations, because we're bringing an update package that's going to consist of new suspension parts, bodywork and some other things.
"But I have never in my 15 years in F1 seen a silver bullet being introduced, where suddenly you unlock half a second of performance. So, I very much doubt that this is going to happen here.
"What I'm looking forward to is that we take certain variables off the table, where we believe we could have introduced something that we don't understand in the car. [I hope] we can go more to a stable platform, and then we should see where the baseline is and what we can do from there."
