After qualifying in P5 in Austria George Russell admitted that his best hope for the race was simply to hang on to his grid position.
Helped by an instant retirement for Max Verstappen – who would probably have had the pace to get in front and stay ahead – Russell achieved his modest target.
Fifth wasn’t much for a guy who won last time out, but nevertheless 10 points was another useful score in a season that has seen Russell consistently at the sharp end.
He’s also now only nine points shy of third placed Verstappen, and beating the Dutchman over the balance of the season is a challenge worth pursuing.
Nevertheless Austria was not a weekend that Russell or Mercedes could be happy with, as high temperatures, the nature of the track and a setup call that backfired conspired to cost him performance.
“I was expecting a bad race, and it was worse than I even could imagine,” he said when I asked him about his afternoon. “The problem was so clear, coming off the back of Canada with the win – with no tyre overheating, we’re the quickest.
“But as soon as you get to a track where there’s a bit of overheating, we drop off so much. The team has been working so hard for six months now to try and solve this issue. We’ve got ideas, but we’re not really making major headway right now.”
Russell agreed that it could have been a lot worse as he once again logged the best result achievable on the day.
“For sure, damage limitation,” he said. “I still take pride in the fact that almost every race this year, we’re maximising the result.
“Today, we definitely could not have achieved anything higher than P5, the same way as last week, the win was the potential, and we got the win. So fingers crossed, it stays cloudy for the rest of the season…
“This was a bit of a perfect storm. The tarmac is one of the roughest of the season, obviously, high-speed circuit, you’re going around the track many times, the most number of laps in the season, and then 50 degrees track temperature. So it was sort of that perfect storm.
“Silverstone is a higher-speed circuit, but the tarmac is actually quite new, which is good news. If the track temperature is the same like last year, it was like 20 degrees, I think last year, it was quite cool, we were on pole. But two weeks ago, it was 31 degrees in England. So if it’s 31 degrees, we won’t be on pole this year.”
The good news for him is that lower temperatures are indeed predicted for the coming weekend, and that could give the W16 a boost.
Mercedes will certainly try to learn lessons from the Red Bull Ring, as team principal Toto Wolff acknowledged.
“When you look at our performance, last year we won the race here, and we were, I don’t remember, 10-15 seconds behind the leaders,” the Austrian said of his home race.
“It was a very solid performance. And this year we are minute behind the leaders. So that is clearly out of the ordinary. What happened today? We do experiment at the moment a little bit how to put the car on track, where we put the balance.
“And clearly, this one we got wrong, and we know that. So I think it’s not only down to those factors, asphalt, long corners and heat. Clearly, that’s not our sweet spot, but it doesn’t explain the gap, and I think we know why. But in hindsight you always know.”
Wolff admitted that the team had taken a setup route that while successful in Canada hadn’t worked out in Austria.
“We need to understand what creates those oscillations, and now is the moment,” he said. “We are not racing for the championship. P2/P3 whatever it is, at the end, only the winning counts.
“And the only positive I take from this race weekend is that we tried something extreme, which was good in Montreal, and it was a complete shot in the knee here.
“Because we could have gone to the setup that we had last year, and that would have put us, I don’t know, on the podium, maybe. But that is not what we tried.”
He continued: “In a way I’m getting fed up with my own explanations of we learn and then next time we understand better. That has been the constant Groundhog Day. But there was something which we tried to take from Barcelona and from Montreal in terms of how we set the car up and where we put the aero and mechanical balance.
“And that was that was clearly wrong. Now we have ticked this box. It would be dramatic if we were racing for a victory, if we were racing for a championship, which we do not. So analyse, dig deep, what was it? And go to Silverstone.”
Asked to expand on that setup choice He added: “We felt that there’s a certain direction we wanted to pursue, which is perfectly logical for Canada, and a bit counter intuitive for Austria.
“And our long runs looked very good. So we thought Kimi’s long run was maybe, second, third, fastest was really good. We can stick to that. And then obviously the temperatures got hotter, the grip ramped up.
“And then we kind of come to the conclusion that we should have maybe stuck to what we knew from last year here.”
Adam Cooper F1 