George Russell fears that Mercedes will struggle to end their winless streak at the Japanese Grand Prix tomorrow and predicts that Ferrari and Red Bull could dominate the podium again.
Lewis Hamilton was the quickest of the Mercedes in this morning's Japanese GP qualifying, placing sixth, almost a second slower than champion elect Max Verstappen on pole. Tomorrow's race seems to be another battle between Red Bull and Ferrari with Charles Leclerc just one tenth of a second behind Verstappen.
Russell comes into the weekend fourth overall in the drivers championship but him and team-mate Hamilton remain without a race win. And the Brit fears they might be short of pace in Japan again.
“I’d love for it to be as competitive as it was last weekend, but I think it’s going to be a little bit more of a struggle,” said Russell. “I think Ferrari have been very fast in the medium, high-speed corners this year.
“The Red Bulls have been really slippery down the straights, which obviously, with only the one DRS zone here, they’ll probably be in a good place as well. So it’s not going to be straightforward, but I think we always show quite good pace on a Sunday. So there’s no reason why we can’t be in the fight.”
Last weekend at the Singapore GP the Mercedes showed more pace with Hamilton qualifying third fastest while Russell started from the back of the grid after having a power unit installed.
Russell posted the fastest lap of the race but finished 14th while Hamilton looked set for a podium until a self-inflicted crash resulted in him dropping to ninth.
Russell said they expected to have good speed at Singapore but were disappointed not to convert that into a good result.
He added: “It’s sort of in line with what we expected. I think these races, especially post-summer break, we’re getting a really clear trend of where our car is working well and where it’s not working and it’s given us a really sort of clear development direction to go down.
“So I think it is a shame for us as a team to have not capitalised on that race weekend. I think we all felt that. But for sure, there’s still a lot of positive signs to take away, especially that we really struggled on three circuits at the start of the year, and arguably that’s probably the fastest race weekend we had last week.”
