George Russell scores his second seasonal win at the F1 Las Vegas GP, the third achieved on track including the Spa round from which he was disqualified due to not meeting the minimum weight requirements.
The Mercedes driver secures his first ever victory starting from pole, in spite of early assaults from Leclerc, to bring back home Mercedes’s first 1-2 of the 2024 season.
Unexpected performance
Russell was extremely pleased with the strong performance he was able to put in at the F1 Las Vegas street circuit to secure his third career win.
In the opening stint, he pulled out a 9-second lead to Verstappen and the Ferraris as he pulled away with great pace, allowing him to manage his hards carefully in the second stint as teammate Lewis Hamilton tried in vain to catch him.
“It’s been a real surprise seeing how strong our pace has been and securing the pole yesterday, I was so pleased with. I think we won the race in stint one, to be honest, stint one was exceptional.
“I knew from there on in the only way we would probably lose the victory is if I grained the tyres and opened them up. So, it was just a case of managing my pace, managing in the right corners and bringing it home,“ he added, expanding on the tyre management skills needed to lock the 25 points.
Favourable track conditions
He cites as main reason behind the sudden improvement of the Brackley-based team performance the particularly favourable track conditions.
The recently repaved American layout eased some of the issues him and his teammate Lewis Hamilton usually struggle with while setting up their challenger:
“It’s no secret that we struggle on the bumpy circuits and we have to lift the car quite a lot. We’ve got to make it much softer, and then we’re in a downforce window where we don’t have any. It’s not that we just suddenly forget how to set the car up, it’s just [that] certain circuits require us to put the car in a window it doesn’t like to be.
“On tracks like this where it’s relatively smooth, we can get the car quite low, quite stiff, with little or no bumps around the track, we fly.”
Qatar next
The strong 1-2 victory definitely will act as confidence boost for the German team, ahead of the two final races of the season. Russell admitted that he didn’t think he could perform this well in Las Vegas, as he was banking on the upcoming Qatar round for a positive finish.
“I think we’ve got a good shot in Qatar, to be honest. Going into this triple header, I had my sights set on Qatar, even to the point that I wanted to take my freshest engine out and put an old engine in for Vegas, to save my best engine for Qatar. And I’m kind of glad we didn’t do that now,” he concluded with a laugh.
Asked on how he will prepare himself and his body ahead of the next race, held in totally different climate conditions and extreme heat, the former Williams driver realistically said he will do the best he can, but that considering it’s the second leg of a triple header, there won’t be much time available:
“I mean, there’s not really anything you can do in these days. Preparation needed to happen beforehand. It’s going to be a challenge for everyone, but we’re all in the same boat. So no one’s going to be on peak condition personally, but it’s just about limiting the losses.”
