Mercedes has made “big step backwards towards the midfield” after Belgian GP qualifying

Last year’s Belgian Grand Prix ended painfully for Mercedes’ George Russell when he was stripped of on-track victory for being underweight – but in 2025 the disappointments have been stacking up even before the lights go out.

Russell qualified 13th for the sprint race, his worst grid position of the year, and spent the entire race in a DRS train behind Yuki Tsunoda’s Red Bull, finishing 12th thanks to Pierre Gasly’s Alpine not making it to the grid. In qualifying for the grand prix Russell reached Q3 but could do no better than sixth, 0.639s off pole position.

He also had the indignity of being deposed from fifth place after the chequered flag by Alex Albon’s Williams, a Mercedes customer. Team-mate Andrea Kimi Antonelli fared even worse, being eliminated in Q1 and is set for the pitlane start.

“My laps felt really strong,” Russell said. “But clearly as a team we’re off the pace this weekend.

“And, other than yesterday, this is my worst qualification of the year – same for Kimi [Antonelli] so we need to understand what’s going on.”

Given the limited practice time during a sprint weekend, teams are naturally reticent to make extensive set-up changes between the sprint race and grand prix qualifying since to go too far would be to venture into the unknown. To alter too much is a mark of desperation, so Mercedes restricted the scope of work on Russell’s car.

“Historically, on sprint race weekends, if you have a bad sprint, if you turn the car upside down for the next day, it rarely works,” he said.

“So we made some sensible changes, but we just need to understand – the first six races of the year, we had four podiums, now we’ve had one in the last six, and clearly we’ve taken a big step backwards towards the midfield.”

It’s clear that Mercedes’ relative performance is trending slightly downwards. At the beginning of the season Russell earned his podiums on merit; his run to second place in Bahrain, driving around a major car problem, was particularly noteworthy.

Russell’s win in Canada was something of an outlier since he benefitted from Lando Norris detonating McLaren’s race by crashing into team-mate Oscar Piastri. Generally speaking, Mercedes’ performance has been more consistent than Red Bull but it has enjoyed fewer peaks.

While Russell ‘won’ from sixth on the grid in Belgium last season, that was more a factor of a daring tyre one-stop strategy which was principally his call. This year the strategic picture is complicated by Pirelli introducing a ‘step’ between the hard and medium-compound tyres in an effort to make one-stops a riskier call.

But, given the high chance of rain on race day and associated lower temperatures, it’s now unlikely the hard tyre will be used – even if the track is dry enough to run on slicks. A two-stop soft-medium-medium is understood to be the optimal plan in those circumstances.

If it is wet, Mercedes will likely suffer more since both drivers were running low downforce levels during qualifying.

George Russell, Mercedes

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images

“In stint one there won’t be any more overtakes [than in the sprint race],” Russell said.

“But of course when you pit, if it’s dry, nobody knows if this hard tyre will be a good tyre or not, and that may force people for a two-stop, people might try the one-stop, so always when you have a variety of strategy, options appear.

“But it looks to be wet – wet races often create some carnage as well…”