George Russell believes he could’ve been in the fight for a podium finish, had it not been for the “misjudgement” that put him on the back foot on the first lap of the Belgian Grand Prix.
“It was just very unfortunate in the beginning,” Russell told the media when asked about his start, where he got caught in the aftermath of the incident between Carlos Sainz and Oscar Piastri.
Photo credit: Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team
“When Oscar had his failure, I went to the left, sort of misjudged that he can turn, I got boxed in, and lost four or five positions at the start.”
Having started eight, the Mercedes driver was down to eleventh after the first lap, and had to focus on recovering—although he felt he could’ve been in contention for a podium finish.
“So that kind of dictated my race. If it wasn’t for that we would have been P5. I would have liked to think I would have been there with Lewis [Hamilton] and Charles [Leclerc], fighting for the podium.”
Russell raced on medium tyres throughout his first stint, before making the switch to softs as part of a one-stop strategy. However, this meant he had to endure several laps on older mediums as his stint coincided with a brief rain shower.
“I mean, it was definitely tricky when the rain started coming down,” Russell recalled.
“Again, if we knew how much rain there was going to be, we would have pitted onto the soft, and that’s when you would have had the biggest difference in those challenging conditions.”
Still, he maintained that the one stop strategy translated to a competitive performance.
“I think one stop around here was a pretty competitive stint. The last stint I felt really strong on the soft tyre. It’s just been a really challenging weekend. Glad it’s over. A bit of a reset, and go again.
“But yeah, all in all, it was a good race.
“Both the races were competitive, opening that gap to P3 in the championship. But we’re still focused on Red Bull, and trying to close that gap.”
Russell admitted that he expected McLaren to be more of a threat than they ultimately were, considering their recent performances, and added that Ferrari’s—specifically, Charles Leclerc’s, as Carlos Sainz eventually bowed out after sustaining damage in his clash with Piastri—form was a surprise.
“They weren’t as competitive as I thought they were going to be this race,” he said.
“I think Charles was maybe a surprise for us. I don’t think we anticipated them being so quick.”
Mercedes is heading into the summer break as the second-best team, 51 points ahead of early-season dark horse Aston Martin, who has fallen behind in the last few rounds. Russell confirmed that the team is targeting a race win before the season’s done—which would be quite the feat, considering Red Bull has collected 12/12 victories between both of their drivers in the first half of 2023.
“But as I said, we’re in a good place in the teams’ championship. That looks pretty secure for now. But we’re just focused on trying…we want to win a race this year.”
On his side, Russell has been trying to figure out how to tweak the car set-up to his liking to extract the maximum performance out of it, and it seems the Belgian Grand Prix has provided some answers in that regard.
“This weekend validated probably the direction we’ve taken with the set-up in recent races hasn’t been the right one,” he conceded.
Russell added that Mercedes occasionally still experiences some bouncing, a much-talked about problem that affected many teams throughout 2022.
“We suffered with a huge amount of bouncing today, a number of teams did, maybe not as severe as we did; still, a bit of a shame to see that in the sport, at the pinnacle, the majority of teams are still struggling with bouncing. I hope something can be [done] in that regard in the future.”
