George Russell blasts ‘unnecessary’ Mercedes actions as Brit refreshingly self-critical

George Russell is navigating a tough patch of form as the season draws to a close.

George Russell has held his hands up after a costly mistake in FP2 destroyed parts of his W15 machine. The Brit admitted to ‘putting so much pressure on the team’ with his crashes in Mexico and Austin.

Russell suffered a major shunt during qualifying ahead of the United States Grand Prix and despite pulling off an exceptional recovery drive, climbing from the pit lane to P6, the damage from that crash had severe financial and logistical ramifications for Mercedes.

The 26-year-old was then involved in another incident in FP2 on Friday, crashing hard into the barriers after losing control of his W15 on the kerb at Turn Eight. Russell was visibly winded when climbing out of the cockpit, and the damage to his Mercedes machine was extreme.

The last two years, I’ve been using that kerb every lap,” he said, dressing down the incident that put him in the barriers. “In FP1, I did four laps using the kerb, and there was no problem and then suddenly I hit it and it was like I was a kangaroo.

What kind of a day was that, really disappointing. The last two weeks have been very hard to handle and I have rather put a lot of pressure on the team now with the non availability of spares. But we don’t really understand the causes behind it. It’s not through sort of overdriving. It’s just the car bites.”

A few have suggested that, alongside a double tangle in Turn Two, Russell made it very tricky for Mercedes and the team might run into budget cap problems thanks to some problems that befell Hamilton in Austin as well. Despite this though, as per Russell, this is not much of a worry for Toto Wolff’s team.

No issue with the idea of a budget cap because there has always been margin and you are always evaluating what you spend in this season and what you spend in next season, he added.

Perhaps the rest of this season we have to choke it out a bit and to be quite honest I probably wouldn’t mind that because we’re not in a battle for a championship.

As for myself personally, to stick with the old floor gives me more than enough chance for the next year. But I think we will be able to repair the floor from Austin. I think that’s the plan. It was not as worse off as we thought, and that should get out to Brazil.”