George Russell is confident that focusing on the bigger picture will pay off in the long term this season, as Mercedes prepare to defend their hold of the top of the Standings at the Miami Grand Prix.<\/p>\n
The Silver Arrows<\/a> have been the strongest team of the season so far, though Russell<\/a> \u2013 who was widely regarded as the favourite for the 2026 title \u2013 currently finds himself nine points adrift<\/a> of team mate Kimi Antonelli having finished P4 last time out in Japan.<\/p>\n Asked whether the dynamic within Mercedes has been affected by Antonelli<\/a> leading the Championship with 72 points to Russell’s 63, the Briton responded: \u201cNo, not at all. I was asked the question this morning and we were talking about the London Marathon.<\/p>\n \u201cIt made me think \u2013 the guy who\u2019s running the London Marathon after three miles isn\u2019t thinking about the finish line because he\u2019s got 23 miles to go. We\u2019re in race four of the season so it\u2019s not even a consideration.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course [Kimi]\u2019s done an amazing job so far this year. The last race was a little bit unfortunate from my side but these things go one way one weekend and swing back later in the year. I\u2019m experienced enough to know how a Championship works and there\u2019s a long way ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n Following a dominant weekend at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, the British driver dropped behind a victorious Antonelli in China before an unfortunately timed Safety Car saw him settle for fourth place in Japan.<\/p>\n With Mercedes eager to seal both Championships this season, Russell shared that he doesn\u2019t want to allow a disappointing result or the intra-team battle to distract him from their rivals’ improvement, especially as many of them are set to introduce upgrade packages in Miami.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s pretty clear \u2013 we fight each other hard, but we fight each other fair,\u201d he explained when asked about the team’s approach. \u201cRight now, there\u2019s lots of talk about the fight between Kimi and I, but we also need to make sure that we continue being the ones to beat.<\/p>\n \u201cLast year it was Oscar [Piastri] and Lando [Norris] and from nowhere, you had [Max] Verstappen come. Charles [Leclerc] is doing a great job, Lewis [Hamilton] is fast and McLaren<\/a> are bringing their upgrade this weekend. I\u2019m sure Red Bull<\/a> won\u2019t be in this position forever as well, so we can\u2019t take it for granted.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just going about my business as usual. I want to be on pole, I want to make a good start, I want to at least be at the first corner in the position I started and fight for victory.”<\/p>\n Speaking on media day ahead of the return of track action in Miami, Russell also admitted that he wants to remain realistic about Mercedes\u2019 chances of succeeding at every round and remember how many scoring opportunities are on offer \u2013 something which he learned in his junior days when he won back-to-back GP3 and Formula 2 titles.<\/p>\n He said: \u201cThe championships I fought and won as a youngster weren\u2019t from winning every single weekend \u2013 you have weekends where the car breaks down, you have an incident, you\u2019re unfortunate.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the same with the guys who were fighting for the Championship last year. You\u2019re always going to have these difficult weekends and I hope every difficult weekend results in either a P2, like we had in China, or a P4 like Japan.<\/p>\n “If that is my difficult weekend, I\u2019m pretty damn happy with that. I\u2019m hoping just to have a smooth weekend. I know that with a smooth weekend, I can win.<\/p>\n \u201cThe team have done such an amazing job to deliver us this car but from my side, I just need to keep ensuring that I\u2019m driving as fast as possible every time I jump in the race car. We\u2019re not taking it for granted \u2013 we\u2019re still pushing ahead and trying to keep improving the car. We still have lots of things we need to improve, like the race starts, so full attack.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"George Russell is confident that focusing on the bigger picture will pay off in the long term this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":640806,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":["post-640805","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\/640805","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=640805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640805\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}