George Russell mourns a better grid position at his home Grand Prix at Silverstone. The Mercedes driver was faster than Lewis Hamilton in all three sectors in qualifying, but is behind his team-mate on the starting grid because he made a mistake in turn 3 on the all-important lap.
The mistake “cost four or five tenths,” Russell claims, explaining: “The lap was rather average because I didn’t start it with ideal temperatures. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a missed opportunity. But we definitely didn’t perform that the car would have deserved today.”
“I had a good feeling in Q1, I was on course for the top 3, but then it gradually got worse and I lost confidence. I made a mistake on the last lap. The speed was there, around fifth or maybe fourth,” he says, adding self-critically: “It was difficult to find the right line. I didn’t do that well.”
If you consider that Hamilton has not exhausted its potential due to poor battery management, then it can be roughly extrapolated that Mercedes would have finished P4/5 under normal circumstances. And the gap would not be 1.0 and 1.2 seconds, but a maximum of half.
Russell convinced: Mercedes has become better
But: “Qualifying is still a weakness,” says Russell. At the same time, he emphasizes: “I think we made progress at least in the dry. We have a faster race car than in qualifying. We reduced the gap there. I would have been really interested to know where we would have ended up in a dry qualifying.”
Because the latest updates for the Mercedes F1 W13 E Performance have not failed to have the desired effect. After Barcelona managed to eliminate aerodynamic “porpoising” to a large extent, more downforce was applied to the car again.
Russell therefore hopes to show at his home race. Lando Norris and Fernando Alonso, who are in front of him on the starting grid, shouldn’t really be opponents in terms of sheer performance: “I hope that I can overtake Alonso and Lando quickly so that we can see how strong we really are,” says the Mercedes driver.