In any Formula 1 World Championship campaign, there are swings of fortunes between the main contenders—and when that involves teammates, that roller coaster seems even more apparent. After Kimi Antonelli scored his fifth straight win in Monaco, the Italian had a 68-point advantage over George Russell. Just two races later, the margin is down to 40 as the season heads to the Brit’s home event at Silverstone.
In Spain, Antonelli had the misfortune to retire with a battery issue, which in effect cancelled out a similar non-score for Russell in Canada. In Austria, a not-quite-perfect weekend for the teenager coincided with a great one for Russell, who bounced back from recent frustrations. Everything turned on qualifying; Russell was savvy enough to identify that a yellow flag was a single and not a double, and he could thus finish his lap and earn pole. Antonelli thought he saw a double and aborted, which is standard practice, but he threw away a lap—one which admittedly would probably have only been good enough for P2, behind Russell.
Instead, he was only P4, and he was kicking himself for a rare mistake—albeit one that he could be forgiven for, as this was a safety issue, and drivers are supposed to take yellows seriously. From that position, he was determined at the start to get ahead of at least one of the Ferraris that separated him from Russell. Instead, he had a scrappy first couple of laps that saw him run wide and go off the road several times, and end up losing a spot to Max Verstappen. It was only the tire struggles of Maranello’s cars that later allowed him to move up to third.
Out front, Russell made serene progress to log his first victory since the Melbourne season opener. It was a definitive statement to the effect that, despite a torrid time and some sheer bad luck when Antonelli was on the ascendancy, he is very much back on form and in the title fight. It’s all too easy to underestimate Russell and categorize him as someone not quite in the top league, but don’t forget he outpaced Lewis Hamilton regularly when they were teammates, and scored some good wins with a difficult car.
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Team boss Toto Wolff acknowledged that it hadn’t been easy of late for Russell. “It’s such a high-pressure environment that you have a young teammate, and then he’s so strong, you have a DNF, you’re falling behind,” Wolff said after Sunday’s race. “And I think, like every top athlete you can kind of get yourself in a spiral. And that is not this spiral of negativity, it’s more a spiral of overthinking. What can I do more? Where do I need to optimize?”
Wolff made his point earlier in the weekend by telling Russell “just drive” on team radio during qualifying. In other words, forget about all the rest. “Sometimes you forget about the coalescence, and this is just driving the car,” said Wolff. “And this ‘just drive’ is something that we talk a lot about—just be in the moment of driving the car. Don’t overthink too much about the strategy, or what Kimi is doing. Drive the car as fast as you can, look at the tire temperatures, and don’t burn them. That’s the only metrics you need to look at. And that’s what I was trying to say.”
Aside from Russell’s personal return to form, Mercedes also bounced back after losing to Hamilton and Ferrari in Barcelona. The Italian team had power unit upgrades in Austria, and the SF-26 was quick in qualifying, so it was a relief to Wolff and all in the Stuttgart manufacturer’s camp that normal service was resumed.
“In the sport. we tend—and the same with some competitors—to swing between mania and depression,” said Wolff. “Everyone is like one weekend we’re the greatest, and we are World Champions, and this is all fantastic. And the next week, and this is five days later, is the big depression that everything is shit, the upgrade didn’t work, the engine is not what we wanted. But the weekend before, it was actually the best. And I think it’s important to keep the balance, to keep the neutrality.”
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Wolff points out that a team and driver can’t get it right every time when there is such a busy schedule and a variety of tracks with different challenges. “You’re going to have swings in performance, you’re going to have DNFs that go in your favor or not,” he said. “And some you win, some you score solid points, some you lose. And it’s over the twenty-two races that we’re going to have in the season—hopefully—that you need to optimize on that, rather than to swing emotionally and then declare state of emergency and everything is down the shit.”
He noted how Russell has changed the world’s perception of him over qualifying and the race in Austria: “If we would have spoken about George thirty-six hours ago, we would have said, his campaign is really not going, and is he ever going to recover? Now, Sunday afternoon, he is the real deal. So let’s keep the trajectory, that’s important—and that’s why I have never had any doubt that this can go very long in the driver championship who can potentially win this? It’s a three-way race at the moment, and that’s why it’s about scoring those points.”
Antonelli is still those 40 points in front. The Barcelona power unit failure wasn’t his fault, and if a bad weekend like Austria is still third place—within an ace of passing Verstappen for second—you can’t complain too much. The key is that Antonelli has always shown he absorbs everything and learns for the future.
“The first few corners, this is where the race got lost [for Antonelli],” said Wolff. “Full attack mode, missing, braking turn one, missing braking turn three, missing braking turn four. But as I said, this is exactly what I expect from him. Like yesterday, the yellow—that’s never going to happen to him in his life again, to not see whether it’s a double yellow [or] a single yellow. In the same way today, he just wanted to be right there on George, he wanted to right be on ahead, and that cost him a position or two.”
There’s still a long way to go, and Hamilton and Ferrari will still be in the fight if they can find a bit more power. And then there’s that man Verstappen, who made the most of the latest Red Bull upgrades in Austria.
“I think this could be a George Russell thought overcomplication,” joked Wolff. “Max is always good for playing a role in the championship. That car performed well this weekend. I think the biggest factor this weekend was Max, to be honest, and he’s able to just wrinkle out everything that in that car. You can see that with his teammates, and that’s why you can never, ever discount or underestimate the Verstappen factor for a championship.”