Mercedes to hold “big meeting” over F1 performance drop

George Russell has revealed he is set to have a “big meeting” this week with Mercedes to try to understand its recent drop in performance in Formula 1.

After making an early pass on Williams’ Alex Albon to take fifth place, Russell was unable to close the gap to Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc, who were battling ahead of him for third. Since claiming his first victory of the season in Canada, Russell has only managed top-five finishes in Austria and Belgium while finishing 10th at the British Grand Prix. 

Branding the race at Spa-Francorchamps as “underwhelming”, the British driver is eager to sit down with the Brackley-based team to determine what decisions have led to the decline in performance.

“Yeah, it was pretty underwhelming, to be honest,” he explained to Sky Sports F1. “Because we tend to favour the cooler conditions. So we couldn’t have really asked for better weather for us. But we’ve just had no pace recently. We need to sit down, all of us.
 
“We’re going to have a big meeting this week with all the designers and engineers. To sort of understand the decisions we’ve made in recent weeks or months. And why we’ve gone backwards. So hoping for some improvements in Hungary.”

The Mercedes driver also confirmed to F1 TV that fifth “was probably flattering the real pace of the car.”

“Yeah, for sure,” Russell agreed, when asked if fifth was the best result he could have achieved today. “We need to understand why we’ve lost so much pace in recent races. Of course, that’s frustrating for all of us as a team. P5 was probably flattering the real pace of the car, so I’m at least happy we got the maximum possible.

“We made a clear change of direction a couple of months ago, and I think it’s been since that point we’ve taken a step backwards, so you know, it sometimes takes a few races to understand what the real reasons are for that lack of pace, but clearly it seems that we need to revert back to what we had earlier in the season.”