Mercedes technical director James Allison has denied his team is favouring title leader Andrea Kimi Antonelli over stalwart George Russell in this year’s championship battle.
Russell was widely tipped as the title favourite this season, his eighth in Formula 1, over sophomore teammate Antonelli, whom he handily beat last year.
Antonelli, however, has roared from the blocks. After finishing second to Russell in Melbourne, the Italian won five grands prix in a row to sprint to a 68-point advantage over his teammate until his first DNF of the season in Canada shrunk that gap to a still chunky 50 points.
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Unreliability and misfortune have played a role in opening Russell’s deficit enough for Lewis Hamilton to move into second place, but Antonelli has also clearly been the quicker Mercedes driver, leading the sister car 4-3 in qualifying this season and demonstrating at least equal race at every grand prix.
Russell has put the disparity between the two down to him being uncomfortable with the 2026 Mercedes, which he says is better suited to Antonelli’s driving style.
Though some interpreted those comments a suggestion Mercedes was biased towards its younger star, technical chief Allison has denied there’s any internal favouritism at play.
“People are very invested in the people that they support, and they want their driver to prosper above all others,” he told the Mercedes Silver Arrows Radio Show podcast.
“If you ever wanted to understand where [favouritism] sits on our psyche, you’d need to come and work in a team, because if you were lucky enough to come and work in a team, you would instantly — instantly — be imbued with the culture of that team and you would understand how utterly alien that thought is to anyone in the team.
“When we hear it, it’s like we’re hearing another language.”
Though Allison conceded he was unlikely to convince anyone who strongly believed the conspiracy, he underlined that the team’s priority was winning the constructors championship, for which it needed two competitive — and two motivated — drivers rather than one star and one subjugated number two.
“It is in all of our interests that both our drivers prosper,” he said. “We are ambivalent about which one is better than the other. We want a one-two in every race, and we don’t care the order.
“Our main championship, weirdly, is not the drivers championship; it’s the constructors championship.
“If we’re lucky enough to win a bonus, we win it on the basis of the constructors ‘Utterly alien’: Passionate reply over title conspiracy ; Supercars star set for F1 run — Pit Talk position, not the drivers [title result] — we don’t get anything for that.
“Everything we care about is constructors-oriented, and favouritism makes zero sense to us in that respect. We just want maximum points from both the drivers at all times.”
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He admitted, though, that Mercedes would consider backing one of its drivers if threatened by another team.
“The only point where we would start to have an opinion is if one driver is mathematically incapable now of winning a championship and the other driver is in a fight with a third-party driver,” he said.
“At that point the team has a right to an opinion, but up until that point we just want both our players to be right up there every single race.”
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has already canvassed discussions about instituting team orders in races when victory is at stake, having wondered aloud whether prioritising Antonelli during the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix would have boosted the team’s odds of beating Hamilton in the race. Both Antonelli and Russell lost time battling one another for what at the time was the lead of the race but eventually became second place.
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WILL BROWN IN SUPERCARS AUSTRIAN GP DEMO
Supercars 2024 champion Will Brown will tackle the Red Bull Ring at this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix in a demonstration run for Red Bull and Ford.
The exhibition is one stop on a four-leg European tour for a globetrotting Supercars-spec Red Bull-branded Ford Mustang, which last weekend appeared at a round of Drift Masters at Ireland’s Mondello Park.
Brown will get behind the wheel of the Gen3 car this weekend in Spielberg. Though the run plan has not been revealed, race organisers have one window on Friday, after FP1, and two on Saturday, on either side of final practice, set aside for a drift show.
“Never thought I’d be taking the Supercar to a Formula 1 grand prix in Europe — and in Austria, the home of Red Bull,” Brown said. “What an unreal opportunity!”
“Probably one of the biggest things I’ve done with the team so far.”
“We see so many people commenting on Supercars race highlights, and they’re commenting from overseas. They’re loving what we’re doing here when we race!
“It’s another way to connect with them and get them into the sport. How many people have heard an Aussie V8 screaming around the Red Bull Ring? That is going to sound cool.”
Triple Eight boss Jamie Whincup will then take control of the car for the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the UK on 9–12 July, where he will compete in the event’s iconic hill climb.
The car will make its final European appearance of the tour in Latvian capital Riga alongside F1 and MotoGP machinery during a Red Bull demonstration event on 14–15 August, with co-driver Scott Pye being the wheel.
“The power of our Ford Racing and Red Bull partnership is that it’s global and allows us to showcase our car, team and drivers worldwide,” Triple Eight boss Jamie Whincup said.
“The car was in Las Vegas earlier in the year, we just drove it in Miami, now we have an awesome opportunity to take it to Europe and show a whole new audience what an Aussie Supercar can do.
“There’s no other racing series quite like Supercars — we know that. We saw that ‘flying’ through the streets of the Gold Coast and the racing at Bathurst — once you experience a Supercars race, see it and hear it, you’re hooked.
“Our goal is to bring what we do to a whole new audience, keep building our passionate fan base that follow the blue oval and the Red Bull Ampol Racing team — and show the fans back here the cool things we get up to while we’re not competing in the Supercars Championship.”
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CARLOS SAINZ: WILLIAMS ‘FURTHER AWAY THAN EXPECTED’ IN CONTRACT YEAR
Carlos Sainz says he is weighing up how long he wants to wait for Williams to return to competitiveness amid the team’s struggles during a bumper silly season.
Williams bet big on making a big step forward this year on a trajectory towards victory contention in 2028.
James Vowles committed almost all of last year’s development time to the 2026 car after having modernised the factory in recent seasons following years of underinvestment, but the project started badly, with crash test failures leading to the car missing the first of three pre-season tests. When it did hit the track, it was both slow and overweight.
Reducing weight is a time-consuming process in the budget cap era, with the weight coming off only as the targeted parts are upgraded during the normal performance development process. Vowles has said it will take until after the mid-season break to shed what estimates suggest was as much as 30 extra kilograms.
The step backwards comes at a potentially awkward time for Sainz, who is out of contract in a year as many as 17 drivers could be free to change teams. The Spaniard, a winner with Ferrari before being pushed out by Lewis Hamilton, could be a major player if a top seat opened up.
The 31-year-old admitted that the team’s struggles this year had him evaluating whether its trajectory still matched his expectations.
“I think [winning in 2028] is a realistic goal now, but it’s also true that the step backward we’ve taken this year might have delayed that goal by a few months or a year,” he said.
“I don’t know exactly how much it’s delayed it in terms of my timeline, how long I thought this project would take to become a winning team.
“It’s true that last year we were closer to the leaders than expected, and this year we’re further away than expected, so perhaps one thing balances out the other.
“It’s something I’m working on, also in my head, how long I’m willing to wait to win again in Formula 1.
“I want that time to be as short as possible, and that’s why, even though James says 2028, I’m going to push the team to make it happen sooner.”
Sainz said the team had made good progress on getting the car’s weight down but that it was clear the car is fundamentally not as competitive as hoped.
“If I had to say where we want to be compared to where we are now, we’re halfway there in terms of reducing the weight,” he said. “We’ve made a huge effort in the first six races of the year to cut that half of the excess weight. We still have the other half to go.
“Now we need to focus not only on the weight but also on bringing in aerodynamic improvements, because we know the car is where it is in terms of weight, but we know that aerodynamically it’s not where we want it to be.”