Kimi Antonelli and George Russell, leaders of the Formula One world championship in a dominant Mercedes car, are \u201cabsolutely off the leash\u201d to race one another, their team principal, Toto Wolff, has said.<\/p>\n
Antonelli won the Japanese Grand Prix<\/a> on Sunday, the 19-year-old\u2019s second victory on the trot and with Russell managing only fourth, the Italian now leads his teammate by nine points.<\/p>\n Wolff insisted there was no plan to use team orders between them unless it becomes necessary at the sharp end of the season.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re three races in, the car is good so we need to continue to do our job and give them a tool that they can continue to win or fight for the positions,\u201d he said. \u201cThen towards the end of the season, we\u2019re going to see how the points fall and whether anything needs to be done at that stage.<\/p>\n \u201cAbsolutely off the leash both of them, as long as there\u2019s obviously this kind of margin between the cars we are fine.\u201d<\/p>\n Mercedes have won all three races this season, as the sport enters its unexpected break after the cancellation of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix<\/a>, with the next meeting in Miami in five weeks. Russell won the opening round in Australia<\/a> but Antonelli, in only his second season in F1, has since emerged on top. His victory at Suzuka made him the first Italian to take consecutive F1 wins since Alberto Ascari in 1953 and he is the youngest leader of the world championship.<\/p>\n Russell however has not endured the best fortune during these opening rounds. He had a mechanical problem in qualifying in China and similarly the team made setup changes in Japan before qualifying which made his car harder to handle. In the race he was hugely unlucky at the timing of a safety car just after he had taken his pit stop.<\/p>\n However the 28-year-old was unfazed by the difficulties and expectant he would come back stronger in Miami.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the moment, it is just one thing after the other,\u201d he said. \u201cRacing can go for you, but it can also go against you too, and at the moment, every issue we are having is on my side of the garage and I am the one going through that pain.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes people have problems in practice. We have not had a single issue in practice but I have had problems in qualifying instead. It is the luck of the draw with these new cars. But it is race three of 22 and I am not concerned at all. It is a long year, and I know I have got what it takes to bounce back. I won\u2019t dwell on it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kimi Antonelli and George Russell, leaders of the Formula One world championship in a dominant Mercedes car, are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":570447,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":["post-570446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570446\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/570447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}