Can George Russell challenge for the world championship next season if Mercedes provides him with a fully competitive car? Given the form he has shown in 2022 with the difficult W13, the answer has to be yes – but to achieve his goal he’ll have to beat team-mate Lewis Hamilton in the same machinery.
Following a three-year apprenticeship with Williams, Russell, 24, was promoted to the big time with Mercedes in 2022, and he fully expected to have a car with which he could score race victories. After all he’d already had a taste of the top when he replaced the Covid-struck Hamilton at the 2020 Sakhir GP – a race he could have won, had fortune gone his way.
Instead he faced a very different kind of season as his team struggled to fight its way out of the hole it found itself in at the start of the year with severe porpoising and ride issues.
It’s all relative, of course. A bad Mercedes is still better than most other cars on the grid, and Russell was able to grasp the opportunity to prove beyond all doubt that he deserves his place in the front rank with an impeccable drive to win the penultimate race of the season in Brazil .
With one race to go in Abu Dhabi it ensured Mercedes takes away at least one winner’s trophy from an otherwise barren 2022 campaign. But, perhaps more importantly, it has given the team the belief that it is on track to challenge for victory in 2023.
“I think it’s such a boost for all of us to recognize that we are on the right track, and improvements and developments we’ve been bringing to the car are the right ones,” Russell tells Motor Sport. “And that’s sort of a brilliant feeling, to know that we are on the route to victory again.
“The mindset now is we can definitely fight for the championship next year. And even if we don’t start off with the fastest car, I’m very confident we’ll have a car that is a lot closer than it was this year. Everyone’s just excited for this winter period when we hit the track for the first time in Bahrain.”
Russell’s maiden victory was a long time coming: he logged his first pole position in July in Hungary, and scored a string of podium finishes, often against the odds. In the first part of the year, he regularly outperformed Hamilton, perhaps because after his Williams struggles he was more tuned in to driving difficult Formula 1 cars than the seven-time champion.
Before 2022 George Russell had never heard of porpoising, but the problems with Mercedes’ W13 have gradually been rectified.
Mercedes Benz AG
“I think it was a good learning process for George,” says Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff. “It’s also been a lesson in humility for all of us, and not feeling any sense of entitlement. That is something that he has discovered, that you’re joining Mercedes, but not necessarily fighting for a world championship straight from the get-go.”
Russell made huge strides in his three years with Williams. It should pay dividends next season. “I feel like you don’t naturally get any faster,” he says. “Your speed over one lap is your speed over one lap, but you hone your skills in terms of race starts, tire management, dealing with dynamic situations, whether it’s the weather, or qualifying situations.
“I’ve taken a good step with my race pace this year. It was difficult, because for the first three years, I was sort of in no-man’s land. I was just racing on my own, doing what I thought was right.
“And you sometimes need that experience of a teammate to learn from in certain circumstances. You have to make your own mistakes, you’ve got to learn from those. And that was always difficult when I was just on my own. Definitely this year I think I’ve adapted quite quickly. It’s been a relatively good year personally, but I feel we’ve got a lot more in the locker. So that also gives me a lot of motivation.”
The three Williams years were invaluable for Russell, but he can be forgiven for thinking that he was ready to move up earlier.
Consider his contemporaries, Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen, who ran a season and a bit with Sauber and Toro Rosso respectively before being fast-tracked into the senior teams at both Ferrari and Red Bull.
It wasn’t quite that easy for Wolff to make such a call on an early graduation with Russell. Not only did the Austrian face the complication of how and when to unload Valtteri Bottas, but having agreed to take Russell the Williams team was determined to keep him for the full three years of the original deal. He was the team’s biggest asset, the man who could pick up priceless points for the Grove outfit.
“I felt ready after year one to make that step,” Russell concedes. “And who knows what would have been had I made that step in 2020? Ultimately I was fully locked-in, and couldn’t really do anything about it, especially when Williams was going through that sales process.”
After that patient wait the move to Mercedes didn’t bring the immediate rewards that he had expected.
“It’s definitely been intense,” he says of 2022. “And I think it’s been quite a unique journey sort of throughout this year, because of the issues we’ve faced, solving one issue, running into a different problem. Dealing with the porpoising, which I’d never even heard of or experienced in my life before.
“These have all been sort of unique challenges, and how we’ve turned the page and really closed that gap to the front two has been quite exciting to see.”
Mercedes first realized that it was in big trouble at the Barcelona test. At that stage the camp still had high hopes for the ‘no-sidepod’ spec that was introduced for the second session in Bahrain, but after it was run the fundamental issues remained in the car.