{"id":315916,"date":"2025-11-29T06:38:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-29T06:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/315916\/"},"modified":"2025-11-29T06:38:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-29T06:38:10","slug":"george-russell-surprised-by-qatar-sprint-qualifying-pace-after-securing-impressive-p2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/315916\/","title":{"rendered":"George Russell surprised by Qatar Sprint Qualifying pace after securing impressive P2"},"content":{"rendered":"

George Russell was left surprised with his second place in Sprint Qualifying ahead of the Qatar Grand Prix, claiming performances over one lap “haven’t been great recently”.<\/p>\n

The Mercedes driver put in a strong performance on Friday, setting a time good enough to split poleman Oscar Piastri <\/a>and McLaren team mate Lando Norris on the grid for Saturday’s 19-lap Sprint.<\/p>\n

Mercedes<\/a> require a strong result this weekend to secure second in the Teams’ Championship, as they sit 40 and and 53 points ahead of Red Bull and Ferrari respectively.<\/p>\n

“It’s just nice, my Qualifying hasn’t been great recently, bar Singapore,” said Russell.<\/p>\n

“For a while I haven’t had a good session so I was pretty happy to get good laps under my belt and I was always sort of there or thereabouts throughout the session, so that was nice.<\/p>\n

“This track is such a joy to driver around. It’s so quick, the grip is so high, it feels nice.”<\/p>\n

With the Lusail International Circuit consisting of medium- and high-speed corners, overtaking has proved difficult in the past, leading Russell to suggest the order will most likely stay the same after the opening corners in Saturday’s race.<\/p>\n

“I don’t want to put a downer on it but Turn 1 is probably going to be where we end up really,” he said.<\/p>\n

“We briefly spoke about it this morning in the Drivers’ Briefing about why the DRS hasn’t been extended and I hope maybe after the Sprint they can adjust it if needed for the race, but it’s going to be very challenging to overtake but obviously we’re in a good starting position. We’ll take it.”<\/p>\n

Team mate Kimi Antonelli<\/a>, meanwhile, was left in P7 having just squeezed through to SQ3 after Isack Hadjar was stripped of his final lap time due to track limits.<\/p>\n

The young Italian had made a small mistake on his own lap, which in turn meant he lost confidence in the final segment of Sprint Qualifying.<\/p>\n

“Was a bit of a messy Qualifying on my side. I had a pretty big moment in SQ2 and kind of lost a little bit of confidence,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Just didn’t maximise the grip today, the potential was very high. I found myself always one step behind so just need to work into the data to understand and in order to be quicker tomorrow.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"George Russell was left surprised with his second place in Sprint Qualifying ahead of the Qatar Grand Prix,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315917,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-315916","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-motor","11":"tag-motor-sports","12":"tag-motosport","13":"tag-motosports","14":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315916","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=315916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}