Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
Motorsport
Motorsport
Sport

Why Russell struggled at "bogey" F1 track COTA

However, he insists that there were signs of speed that suggested that the race represented a missed opportunity for him.

Russell started Saturday's sprint from only 11th place after running out of new tyres for the sprint shootout and picking up a three-place penalty for impeding.

He managed to recover to seventh, and then repeated that result in Sunday's Grand Prix, having qualified fifth on Friday and then lost three positions at the start.

After the flag, he gained two spots in the final results following the disqualifications of Hamilton and Charles Leclerc.

Hamilton, meanwhile, was second to Max Verstappen in both the sprint and the main race, before he lost his result in the latter.

Russell was adamant that there was much more potential in his weekend had everything worked out better.

"I mean, story of the season really," he said when asked about his race by Motorsport.com.

"It feels like missed opportunities, on the back foot from the beginning, making a bad start. And then we put the hard tyre on, we had to manage the fuel, we had to manage the engine a little bit, and I was about a second off the pace.

"Then we put the medium back on, and we were the quickest car on track, closed in on Max by about 10 seconds, and on Lewis by a couple of seconds. So I'm standing here thinking it was definitely another missed opportunity, and frustrating that we weren't on the podium."

George Russell, Mercedes F1 W14, Pierre Gasly, Alpine A523 (Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images)

Expanding on that theme, he added: "When I look at the pace today, I think that last stint was a really good example of what the potential was.

"It's often fine margins. I was off the pace in qualifying, and come Q3, the pace was there again, and then on the medium tyres in sprint qualifying, I was ahead in SQ1, SQ2, and I didn't have a new tyre in SQ3.

"So it's just one of those where we were just on the back foot from the beginning. And as I said, it just feels like the story of the year, standing here.

"I think last year, I don't think we ever missed an opportunity probably once in 22 races, whereas this year, it feels like 50% of the races we've been far from maximising the points."

Russell denied that the suggestion that the sprint format had made life harder for him relative to his team-mate.

"We had that last weekend, and it was one of my strongest weekends, in Qatar," he said. "So to be fair, Austin's always been a bit of a bogey track for me, always struggled a bit here, probably always been one of his [Hamilton's] strengths, this circuit.

"But I'm not too concerned because it feels like this is definitely a bit of an outlier with how bumpy it is, really old tarmac with all the subsidence and cracks around it. So I'm not concerned."

shares
comments
Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.