{"id":228039,"date":"2025-10-20T18:19:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T18:19:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/228039\/"},"modified":"2025-10-20T18:19:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T18:19:07","slug":"mercedes-russell-laments-modern-formula-1-a-race-to-turn-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/228039\/","title":{"rendered":"Mercedes’ Russell laments modern Formula 1: ‘A race to Turn 1’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mercedes driver George Russell<\/a> suggested modern Formula 1 has just become “a race to Turn 1” following a drab U.S. Grand Prix.<\/p>\n

What had promised to be an epic race at the Circuit of the Americas turned into one featuring limited overtaking across the field.<\/p>\n

Max Verstappen’s victory<\/a> was the 13th time out of this year’s 19 races the driver starting on pole won the race. Russell had started fifth and ended sixth, having lost a place to McLaren’s Oscar Piastri<\/a> at the start.<\/p>\n

“Right now in F1 it’s a race to Turn 1,” Russell told Sky Sports F1. “There’s no tyre degradation, there’s only three tenths between the quickest car and the slowest car in the top six.<\/p>\n

“Normally, you need at least half a second to overtake, so if I came out of Turn 1 in P3, I’d have been on the podium today. But instead I came out in P6 and I finished P6.”<\/p>\n

George Russell finished sixth in the U.S. Grand Prix.\u00a0Bob Kupbens\/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images<\/p>\n

McLaren’s Lando Norris<\/a> provided some overtaking in his fight with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc<\/a>, although the fact both were on very different tyre strategies helped that be the case.<\/p>\n

F1 has long struggled to find a solution for great wheel-to-wheel racing. The Drag Reduction System (DRS) is being replaced under next year’s rule change but has previously been likened to a band-aid for deeper problems, largely rooted in how difficult it is for modern F1 cars to follow each other.<\/p>\n

Long-time F1 tyre supplier Pirelli has often shouldered a lot of blame for the state of its tyres but Russell explained that it’s unfair to simply focus on that area.<\/p>\n

– Verstappen has turned McLaren’s duel into three-way title fight
–<\/a> Emotional intelligence and talent make Piastri title favorite<\/a><\/p>\n

“Pirelli get a hard time, no matter what,” Russell said. “[When] there’s lots of tyre degradation, people say it’s not real, the drivers can’t push when we have to manage … [then] we don’t like that when there’s no tyre degradation, we say it’s a boring race.<\/p>\n

“They don’t seem to be able to win in any case, so realistically you want a tyre that you can push full gas, but it doesn’t go the whole race If you could choose the tyre, it’s a tyre you can go flat out, but after 15 laps it falls off a cliff and you have to do a two or three-stop race.<\/p>\n

“Ideally, the soft tyre does 12 laps, the medium tyre does 15 laps and the hard tyre does 20 laps and then it falls off the cliff. But that is a lot easier said than done.<\/p>\n

“Pirelli get a very hard time, they do their best, they have given us a substantially better tyre, like this tyre is very good, but it causes bad racing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mercedes driver George Russell suggested modern Formula 1 has just become “a race to Turn 1” following a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228040,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,817,813,816,85],"class_list":["post-228039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}