George Russell says the performance of Mercedes and Red Bull in recent races is “all a bit strange” after Ferrari and McLaren dominated the Italian Grand Prix.
Lando Norris took a comfortable victory at Zandvoort before Charles Leclerc used strategy to beat the two McLarens at Monza, ahead of Carlos Sainz in fourth. Lewis Hamilton, in fifth, was over 22 seconds behind Leclerc, and with the Red Bulls over half a minute off the pace, Russell says it’s a surprise to see such a consistent swing in performance.
“I think it is very tight at the moment, especially in qualifying, but McLaren and Ferrari definitely seem to have the edge on us at the moment,” Russell said.
“It’s all a bit strange, like when you look at Red Bull’s performance, nobody would have predicted that five races ago. So either those guys have made big gains or I don’t know what’s going on, but we need to keep working hard and make some changes.”
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Russell himself ended up seventh behind Max Verstappen in Monza, but was closing on the championship leader in the final laps after losing over ten seconds changing a front wing he had damaged on the opening lap. Russell said it was his mistake that led to him clipping Oscar Piastri, and that it heavily impacted the rest of his race.
“I made a good start alongside Oscar. He had the slipstream from Lando and when he pulled out in front of me and hit the brakes I misjudged it, hit the brakes my side and I was locking up the rear tires and was about to crash into him, so had to take avoiding action and that’s where it all went wrong.
“[I’m] really quite disappointed, because so much hard work goes into all these weekends for it to go away so quick. But, ultimately, I don’t think we would have had the pace to fight with Ferrari and McLaren.”
Teammate Hamilton described his Italian Grand Prix outing as unexciting, having found he couldn’t match the pace of the top four.
“It was a really dull, dull day,” Hamilton said. “I was hoping to have more pace and be able to progress, but I couldn’t even… I mean, I was I think as quick for a while with Carlos but then I had more degradation, maybe as I was right behind, not sure. Just for some reason we didn’t have the pace.”