George Russell secured pole position ahead of the British Grand Prix, leading a Mercedes 1-2 ahead of McLaren’s Lando Norris and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen.
Russell, fresh off his win in Austria last week and buoyed by the support from the home crowd, claimed his second pole in four races, shading Lewis Hamilton by 0.171s. The emphatic result marks Mercedes’s first front row lockout since November 2022, signalling that the team’s recent resurgence may be more than just a temporary high.
“What a feeling, what a feeling!” an ecstatic Russell exclaimed in parc fermé.
“At the start of this year we couldn’t have even dreamt of being on pole here, and a one-two for Lewis and I, Lando in P3… It’s just mega. It’s down to all these fans as well, they give us so much energy, so thank you so much for that.”
Speaking in the Top 3 press conference afterwards, Russell added: “It’s been feeling great since Monaco—Canada, sorry—when we bought these upgrades. You know, the two of us have been qualifying in the top three consistently, but it really came into its own today. We were really quick in FP1 yesterday, we struggled in FP2 a little bit, but these conditions just really got the car into a perfect window, and the lap was just really, really nice.
“(…) I think we’ve made some small changes which have had a big impact.
We knew from the start of this year the baseline of this car is substantially better than what we’ve had in previous years, but we went from having an oversteer car last year, then to an understeer car this year, and now just dialled it back and found the happy medium.
“When you’ve got the balance in a good place, the tyre temperatures are in the right window, and the lap time just really snowballs positively, so it hasn’t been a substantial change, but it’s made a massive difference.
“There’s no guarantees for tomorrow for sure, but you know, you feel like we’re riding this wave at the moment.”
Russell admitted that despite his strong showing in the final segment, he found himself struggling in Q1 and Q2 as mixed conditions caught many of the drivers out.
“From Turn 6 to Turn 9, I gained a lot,” he said. “Turn 6 and 7 was mega. There was a big headwind through there, so I braked really, really late, and just could carry the speed through the corners, but it was just on rails, the car. I just felt so confident in it, and you know, Q3 we really turned it up, because Q1 and Q2 was very, very challenging.
“I felt like I was about to get knocked out at various points. The track improved in every single lap, and probably going into Q3 was the most pressure I’ve ever felt in a qualifying session, because the whole Q1 and Q2 run, I was like, on the verge of getting knocked out every single occasion, and I wasn’t feeling that confident with myself.
“But as soon as I went through Turn 1 and 2 in Q3, I felt good and managed to do the laps. (…) The track dried up and we got into the groove and the lap times came.”
As for converting the promising result to a potential victory, Russell acknowledged that Verstappen and Norris can’t be discounted, but expects the capricious weather to add an element of unpredictability.
“I think realistically we know we’re probably a tenth or two behind Lando and Max,” Russell said, “but I think we’ve got a good fight on our hands, but the weather’s going to play a huge part in that.
“It’s been raining and drying up throughout the last couple of days, there’s a bit of rain on the forecast tomorrow, and we’re probably on course for another Montreal-style race where it’s going to be very changeable.
“So it’s going to be a long race. As I said, we’re riding this wave right now, but it doesn’t mean anything because tomorrow is where the points are scored, but we’re obviously in a great position to pack a victory.”
He continued: “[In] Q1 and Q2, we were just not trying to use our new soft tyres to allow us to have the two new sets for Q3. I think we’ve also saved one set of softs for the race tomorrow, so the soft is a potential race tyre.”
Regarding the set-up, Russell explained that the W15 was optimised for race conditions rather than qualifying—which is why the 1-2 came as something of a pleasant surprise.
“I think if anything, we actually geared [the car] up slightly more for the race, which is normally a trade-off you’d always take—you can qualify P4 and get into the lead on lap one or vice versa,” he said. “It feels so great for it to be here now but the race start, things can change very quickly, so we’d always sort of gear it up slightly more for the race.
“But yeah, I mean nothing’s changed since last weekend and the car’s been performing so well here, so we need to look into it and kind of understand why it’s been so good, especially in these high-speed corners. Because in Austria, Red Bull were miles ahead of everybody and at the moment we’ve been the quickest.”
Russell also briefly reflected on his messy outing in Canada, where his own mistakes cost him time and track positions. He conceded that it was a valuable learning experience, saying: “I said after Montreal, my sort of risk-reward dial was turned up to the max and that sort of played against me at certain points. It’s just, remembering that the race is won right at the end, it doesn’t matter what happens beforehand. (…)
“We still came away with the podium, but every single scenario is so different. Today, for example, in qualifying it was raining in just three corners, and the rest of the track was bone dry, but those two, three corners, people were going off the track—so very, very challenging.”
