“From midfield car to race-winning machine”, Russell explains Mercedes’s swing in form in Baku

Mercedes driver George Russell has revealed that his team endured an enormous swing in performance at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, with the pace improving from “disastrous” to race-winning speed.

George Russell was unable to challenge for a top position in Saturday’s qualifying session at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, securing only the fifth place on the grid. The Briton was then overtaken at the start and looked to be in a lonely race behind reigning champion Max Verstappen.

But once on the hard tyres his car came alive, and he was able to chase the Red Bull down and pass the Dutchman. After their battle, Russell settled for a fifth-place finish, but with Sergio Perez and Carlos Sainz ending their race in the wall after a high-speed crash on the penultimate lap, the Mercedes man grabbed a surprise podium finish on the challenging streets of Baku.

Speaking of the race, Russell has revealed that he was shocked by the initial pace during the opening stint, with his lap times having been over a second slower than what race leader Charles Leclerc managed to achieve.

“We thought we could probably fight for P5. But how the race unfolded, we definitely didn’t expect. We were really slow in the first stint. I was about one and a half seconds slower than Charles most laps. And it all felt pretty disastrous.

“But then the last 20 laps of the race, we were a second a lap quicker than Piastri and Charles and three or four tenths quicker than Max and Carlos and Checo. So, you know, I’m sort of a bit frazzled as to why that is. The only difference is going from a yellow tyre to a white tyre. And, yeah, we need to understand why, understand further.

Mercedes were the only team to run the hard tyres on Friday, using the white-banded compound in Free Practice 2 to complete a high-fuel long run on that. Russell does not think that the additional mileage helped Mercedes fine-tune their cars for the C3 compound.

“Not really, to be honest. In practice on Friday… The track’s been really dirty this weekend, and the track was about three seconds off the
pace on Friday, so I didn’t contribute towards it.”

“We need to understand what happened in the race, because the last stint, we had a car that was comfortably capable of winning this race. And in the first stint, we had a car that probably didn’t deserve to be in the top 10. And the only difference is the tyres.

“We’re not the only team to talk about this. It’s pretty frustrating for all of us sometimes when you just don’t understand the fluctuations in performance between a Q1 and a Q2 session, as an example, or one stint to another. So, yeah, it’s a challenge.

Pushed on to predict what Mercedes will be capable of at this weekend’s Singapore Grand Prix, Russell insisted that it is difficult to say based on the huge performance swings teams have shown in recent rounds.

“I’ve got no idea, to be honest, because as I said, just in this one race, we had a car that could have won if you took the pace from half of the race and a car that should have been outside the top 10 from the other half. So I hope we’ve got the faster version.”