George Russell admits the Bahrain Grand Prix result bodes well for Mercedes having a competitive Formula 1 season, but he still believes he’s an outsider in the drivers’ championship.
Mercedes has struggled in hot conditions in recent seasons, with smooth track surfaces and cooler temperatures providing its most competitive opportunities. However, after securing a season’s-best second place in Bahrain — his third podium in four races — Russell says it’s a particularly important result as it shows the progress with the car’s performance.
“[It gives] a lot of confidence,” Russell said. “This was the real sort of test for us. We knew that our car likes the cold conditions, and the competitiveness we showed in China and Suzuka was no major surprise. But this was going to be the question mark and we’ve had another strong weekend. So it bodes well for the season.”
Despite the positive signs, Russell believes the pace difference with McLaren is still too big at present to count himself as a true title contender, despite only being 14 points adrift of championship leader Lando Norris.
“I’d love to say so, but I don’t think we are, to be honest. McLaren are just too dominant right now,” he admitted. “I think this is probably going to be their peak performance, what we saw this week in Bahrain. What we saw in China and Suzuka was probably their worst-case scenario and they still obviously got one victory from those two races.
“So we’ve got to keep on picking up the points, picking up the pieces. And this weekend we picked up the pieces to get a P2 – and we did it in Melbourne as well to get the P3. I don’t expect this to continue for many races to come, but who knows?”
Team principal Toto Wolff echoes Russell’s encouragement due to the Bahrain result — one he called an “unbelievable” drive from the Briton — and is slightly more optimistic that McLaren could be caught.
“We would have expected that Bahrain would have been one of the very difficult forums for us because of the warm ambient and the very granular, rough circuit,” Wolff said. “In the end, we qualified P2 and P4. We had a car that was able to be solid on the podium, and that is better than we expected.
“So, you can call a race a success if you win, but in the circumstances, one could say it was much better than we expected.
“If you look at where McLaren was last year, I think they were fourth and sixth or fifth and sixth, something like this. You can see how quickly you can turn the tide. Probably [on Sunday] we were a few tenths missing. Don’t know how we would have performed on the medium at the end.
“But definitely we just need to put on our best game and see how it goes on the other tracks.”
