George Russell has admitted his 2026 Formula 1 season has been the first of his career with \u201cmore bad days than good\u201d in a candid first statement following Mercedes teammate Kimi Antonelli\u2019s world championship triumph.<\/p>\n
Russell skipped media duties after Antonelli became F1\u2019s youngest world champion at the Mexico City Grand Prix, with team boss Toto Wolff admittIng his driver was \u201cdistraught\u201d and suffering a \u201ccatastrophic moment\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Englishman had entered the season as a strong favourite and won the opening race of the year but never recovered from five straight Antonelli victories which followed.<\/p>\n
Russell congratulated Antonelli when he got out of the car after Sunday\u2019s race and did so again in a social media post on Monday, in which he vowed to rediscover his old form.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow feels like a pretty suitable moment to speak from the heart,\u201d Russell said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis season started off exactly how I had hoped but it very quickly unravelled with tough luck and poor performances. It\u2019s been the first proper season of my career where I\u2019ve had more bad days than good.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll I know is that I\u2019ve given it my all and 2026 was not meant to be my year. I want to sincerely congratulate Kimi on what has been an absolutely incredible season. You truly deserve the Championship.<\/p>\n
\u201cThank you to the team for producing the best car and power unit this season; it\u2019s been inspiring to see everyone coming together over four tough years to bring Mercedes back to the top.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, all I can promise is that for the rest of this season, and into the next one, I will be giving my absolute all to rediscover the performance I have been capable of producing for the majority of my career and fingers crossed a little bit of luck returns.\u201d<\/p>\n
Russell joined Mercedes in 2022, on the back of eight consecutive constructors\u2019 championships for the team.<\/p>\n
However, his arrival coincided with a rule change and a downturn in fortunes, and the team only won a handful of races until this season. Mercedes entered F1\u2019s new era, with engines featuring a near 50-50 split between conventional combustion power and electrical components, as the benchmark team to beat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"George Russell has admitted his 2026 Formula 1 season has been the first of his career with \u201cmore…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":956127,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[2571,49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":["post-956126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-auto-racing","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\/956126","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=956126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956126\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/956127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=956126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=956126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=956126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}