George Russell admits it was a surprise for Mercedes to struggle with tire overheating in the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix after such a consistently competitive start to the season.
Mercedes has been in the mix for a podium at the majority of races this year, with Russell’s fifth place in Japan his only failure to finish in the top three until Sunday’s race in Jeddah. Again finishing fifth, Russell was nearly half a minute behind Oscar Piastri and was caught out by a particularly severe loss of pace in the closing stages.
“A real surprise, really struggling with tire overheating,” Russell said. “I was holding on to the front two at the beginning just by a thread and then the second stint I was pushing so hard to stay with them and suddenly my tires got way too hot and I dropped off the cliff and I was losing a second a lap in the last seven, eight laps.
“So P5 is where we deserve to finish but the performance was pretty underwhelming.
“This weekend was looking really strong. We did no laps in practice in the long run so I guess we couldn’t really capture the fact that maybe we weren’t on the pace, or we couldn’t capture what the potential problems were going to be.
“So it is interesting, we didn’t expect to be so good in Bahrain and we expected to be stronger here and it turned out to be the opposite. That’s the nature of this sport and everyone’s working hard to try and find more performance.”
Russell wants Mercedes to compare the past two races to gain a better understanding of why it found the going so difficult in Jeddah, but he also believes the car is still lacking the outright performance needed to be in the frame for victories.
“We’re, as a team, on double the points of last year, and myself probably more than double than last year,” he said. “I don’t think we could have achieved a better result at any of the races we’ve been to. [Sunday] was a bad day, and we came home in P5. That’s a positive.
“But we’re, of course, not content with that. We do want to be fighting for wins, but right now we don’t have the pace to do so. But in those moments when you have the pace, we’re just picking up those points, and that is a positive. But we need to find some performance and find it quick.”
