George Russell is feeling confident after qualifying in sixth place at Imola for the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix.
The British driver’s best lap time was just 0.001s of a second slower than Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz in Q3, a sign of progress for the Brackley-based team.
The Mercedes driver feels the newly upgraded W15 is the quickest it has been all season: “The car is feeling probably the best it’s felt all season, especially on such a challenging circuit like this.
“I feel confident. We know it’s directionally correct. Everyone’s bringing upgrades. You’ve seen McLaren brought an upgrade a couple of races ago, and it’s performing really well for them.
“Aston [Martin] brought an upgrade this weekend, and it’s not performing so well for them. This goes to show how difficult and complex it is for everybody. But we have to believe that we can make an upgrade and develop in the right direction.”
The sharp end of the field is incredibly competitive, with just half a second separating the top six in qualifying.
Russell joked he was slightly too heavy heading into the race weekend but was still pleased with his efforts as he narrowly missed out on getting Sainz.
“I felt really happy today. I felt really strong throughout qualifying. P6 was the maximum.
“Always annoying when it’s so close to the car ahead. I’m actually half a kilo too heavy this weekend myself, and you don’t think that’s ever going to make a difference, but half a kilo would have put me P5, which would probably be P4 on the grid, so I’m blaming in my sandwich at lunch for that one grid position.
“I took satisfaction from that lap because it felt really well optimised. It felt really strong. The car felt great.”
Mercedes have floundered over the past couple of seasons, chasing multiple concepts and failing to regularly challenge for victories with the ground effect era of cars.
Russell said they overcompensated over the winter after a troubling year in 2023 and are yet to find the best working window with the car.
“I said last year that we had one issue, all of the changes we’ve made. We’ve now got the other… We’ve gone too far in the other direction. With this sport, there’s always a happy medium, and we haven’t found that just yet.”
