George Russell after qualifying for his home race at Silverstone: “That’s frustrating”

It was already clear from the first qualifying segment that George Russell was struggling in qualifying for his home race at the Silverstone Circuit. The experienced Mercedes driver was caught out by a gust of wind and went off the track. Nevertheless, he managed to extricate himself from his predicament and drive back to the pits under his own power.

There, the local hero was fitted with fresh tyres and then set off once more in pursuit of a faster time. As the tenth-fastest driver, he made it through to Q2, where he set the fourth-fastest lap. His gap to his team-mate Kimi Antonelli, who had already been the fastest in the middle segment of qualifying, was still 0.427 sec at that stage. He reduced this to 0.37 sec in the top-10 segment, though this still left him in fourth place.

Afterwards, the 28-year-old complained: “We analysed the data after qualifying for the sprint and saw that I was losing all my speed on the straights. I’d left a few tenths on the track there. We thought we’d identified the problem and sorted it out, but clearly that wasn’t the case.”

“And it was no different in the Grand Prix qualifying; the speed readings show that I was 6 km/h slower in the final sector than I should have been. In the middle sector, it was 3 km/h. And it’s not just me who’s having this problem; Kimi and all the other drivers racing with Mercedes power were also struggling with a lack of pace. We don’t know exactly what’s going on; the team is working hard to find out, but of course it’s frustrating,” admitted the seven-time Grand Prix winner.

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