George Russell saved Mercedes F1’s race at the United States Grand Prix, with a 6th place finish.
A fairly average result but it contrasts positively with Lewis Hamilton’s retirement after leaving the track at the start of the race in Austin. Indeed, Russell had to start from the pit lane!
“I’m happy with how the race went. We didn’t know what opportunities the race would bring us, but coming from pit lane to sixth and finishing ahead of Red Bull (Perez) gave us a shot made the most of a difficult situation We had good pace throughout the race, especially with the hard tires. We were able to extend this first stint and have fresher tires to attack in the final laps.
“We will work hard in the coming days to analyze the weekend as a whole. The car can still be tricky at times; Lewis doesn’t usually finish races in the gravel like we saw today. When we find its sweet spot it is able to perform well, but it is difficult to achieve consistently. I think the car had the potential to fight for the podium this weekend, but we need to expand. its operating window so we will look to bounce back next weekend in Mexico.”
Lewis Hamilton was quickly eliminated from the race due to a personal driving error. He said he wasn’t even in attack mode when he spun.
“I had a great start. I felt good and got to 12th position after the first lap. 5 places better! Best start I’ve had in a long time in turn 1. I wasn’t even attacking not at that point, I was literally trying to get the car going well, obviously, get the tires up to temperature.”
“The car started bouncing. The left front started bouncing, and the rear rebelled, like George yesterday.”
“In FP1 I had the same thing – I spun in turn 3, which is very rare, I had never spun in turn 3 since All the years I’ve been here, and I’ve never spun there before either.”
“As I said, George had the same problem yesterday, he went back to the old car and he looked fine. Maybe there is something with our new upgrade. We will investigate as much as possible. After today, we will have the data.”
Even if Hamilton had managed to stay on the track during this specific incident, he believes a spin was inevitable given the handling of his W15.
“If I hadn’t had this thing bouncing, I think if it hadn’t happened that lap, it would have happened another lap later. Because something was wrong with the car , and it was the same most of the weekend with this new package that we had.”
“So yeah, it’s obviously devastating, but it is what it is. We’ll have today’s data and we’ll find out whether or not we’re going to use the old spec or the new spec next week.”
