Russell baffled by lack of Mercedes pace in Zandvoort
George Russell admitted that he couldn't understand why he ended up dropping down the order during today's Dutch Grand Prix, having qualified in fourth place on the grid.
Russell spent the first part of today's race in the top three behind Max Verstappen and Lando Norris, very much in the running for a podium position after the disappointment of losing his race win in Spa before the summer.
"I was really shocked at how fast McLaren were. Lando just looked so comfortable out there," he told the media in the paddock after the finish. "Super impressive to see."
But the timing of his first pit stop on lap 25, just one lap later than Ferrari's Charles Leclerc, cost him a position and left him stuck behind the Monegasque.
He was then passed by Oscar Piastri who had made a later stop and was on fresher tyres when he dispatched Russell on lap 40. Mercedes switched Russell to a two-stop strategy.
The second stop ended up dropping him behind Carlos Sainz and Sergio Perez, but the new set of soft tyre didn't produce the sort of speed he needed to make up the lost ground and he finished in P7.
"After the first couple of laps I thought we were on course for a podium here," he said. "Yesterday we qualified fourth, but clearly didn't get something right today. Honestly, right now I'm still scratching my head.
"Friday was good, Saturday was reasonable and looked on course for sort of a comfortable fourth or third prior to the race, and suddenly [we] just went backwards. And I don’t really know what happened.
"Right now I don't have the answers," he said. "It was very tough conditions, this wind with the long corners. But we've had six really strong races and now suddenly we've finished almost a minute behind the winner today.
"I knew the overtaking was going to be difficult," he said. "But you don't lose all of that performance overnight. Just surprised by the lack of pace, really don’t know where that disappeared to."
Russell insisted that this didn't give him cause to doubt the upgrades introduced before the summer break. "I’m not too concerned. If you take the last seven races, we’ve been really strong in six of them.
“We’ve been ahead of Ferrari in all of them and suddenly today they looked really competitive. We need to understand what happened as until today we looked on course for a pretty half-decent weekend."
It was also a tough weekend for Lewis Hamilton, but in his case the causes were more obvious. He made a mistake on his final lap in qualifying and missed the final cut at the end of Q2, and then had a penalty for impeding Sergio Perez.
That left him starting from 14th place on the grid, with the team opting to start him on softs in the hope of making some early gains. That proved only partially successful, but he did end up in eighth at the chequered flag.
"I had a lot of fun today," Hamilton commented. "We planned to do a two-stop, started on the soft. The soft tyre was a very good tyre, it felt much better than the medium tyre in practice."
Hamilton switched to the hard tyre on lap 24 and subsequently pitted again to switch back to the soft for the final stint.
"The hard tyre was pretty decent, [but] it was difficult to see what I needed to do. I was on a two-stopper so I was trying to use up the tyre, but I also wasn't sure whether or not we might possibly go for a one [stop].
"Probably if I got on to the one-stop and managed a little bit better, I could have done a one-stop and maybe finished one spot ahead.
"If I hadn't had the problem in qualifying then I think I had the pace today to be in the top five," he said. And in a pointed reference to his team mate, he added: "If I'd started fourth for example I would've finished at least fourth."
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