George Russell is in “a very weird state of mind” following a Monaco Grand Prix which snowballed away from the Mercedes driver.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Russell eventually finished 12th in Monaco as team-mate Kimi Antonelli won a fifth straight grand prix after penalty drama centred around a pit-lane speeding penalty.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Russell was initially handed the five-second sanction for speeding, on a day multiple drivers were pinged for the same offence, but at his pit-stop under the late safety car after Lance Stroll crashed, did not serve the five-second wait before being serviced.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Under the rules, this was then converted to a drive-through penalty, which Russell served at the end of the first racing lap after the red flag restart.\u00a0\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
However, as the field was bunched up, he fell from third place to 13th on the road, before moving up to 12th after Sergio Perez’s penalty.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
A second successive non-score, coupled with another Antonelli win, means the Italian is 68 points ahead of Russell after six races on 156 against 88, with Lewis Hamilton moving up to second on 90.\u00a0\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Reflecting on a day of misery, Russell explained that he was in a “weird state of mind” and that the situation he finds himself in after years of toiling in non-race winning Mercedes, “painful.”\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“I still very much believe in myself and know what I can do, and we’re not even 30% of the way through, but there have been a lot of points down the drain,” Russell told media, including RacingNews365.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“I am in a very, very weird state of mind because I’ve had very low moments in my career where maybe I’ve had a run of two or three bad races on my own personal performance, but I’ve never had a run of bad luck such as this.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“It didn’t happen when the car was P7 two years ago, or a P3 or P4 car last year, and now I’ve got the car, it feels very painful, but there is still a long way to go.\u00a0\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“I still very much believe in myself and that we’re going to be fighting for race wins until the end of the year, but right now, it is tough.\u00a0\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“When I look at things objectively, when things are balanced out a little bit, I still think I’ll have been very close, and have at least two more victories.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“I know that qualifying was a bad day for me, I accept that, but the result of the last two races, I wish I could take some responsibility for the car breaking down in Canada, or the penalties [in Monaco], but it is completely outside of my control, and that is an incredibly difficult pill to swallow.\u00a0\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“I don’t believe in good or bad luck, but when I look at the season as a whole, I was leading the race in Canada, and broke down.\u00a0\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“I could have been on the podium [in Monaco], and zero points, I was leading in Japan, and the safety car came out 10 seconds after a pit-stop.\u00a0\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“That’s not a lot, and the whole season could look totally different with 70 more points.”\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"George Russell is in “a very weird state of mind” following a Monaco Grand Prix which snowballed away…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":627750,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3007,3010,3008,3011,3009,831,372,49,832,3006,3005,50,3004,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-627749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-daniel-ricciardo","tag-f1-calendar","tag-f1-live","tag-f1-results","tag-f1-standings","tag-ferrari","tag-formula-1","tag-headlines","tag-lewis-hamilton","tag-max-verstappen","tag-motorsport","tag-news","tag-racing","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/627750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}