George Russell has revealed that a gentlemen’s agreement doesn’t exist amongst the Formula 1 drivers, despite ex-F1 driver turned pundit Martin Brundle stating that it does.
Russell made the surprising revelation following an embarrassing early exit from qualifying at the Hungarian Grand Prix, caused by poor track position.
Last season’s pole sitter at the Hungaroring was shockingly eliminated in Q1, with him set to start Sunday’s race from 18th.
Russell’s final hot lap was impacted by several cars travelling slowly in the final sector, in an attempt to make space for their lap.
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The Mercedes star was part of the group looking for space, something which left him frustrated.
He was unsure why the Silver Arrows chose such a risky strategy in Q1, given that the W14 was “more than quick enough” to progress to Q2.
This was proven by Lewis Hamilton, who claimed pole position.
Amongst the group of cars looking for space, some of them tried to swap positions, breaking a so-called gentlemen’s agreement.
Brundle insisted that the drivers have an agreement in place to form an orderly queue when starting their final push lap, something Russell admitted doesn’t actually exist.
“No, because you’ve all got to think about yourself at one point and there’s just so many cars on track, I understand why some cars didn’t,” Russell told Sky Sports F1, when asked if the agreement is real.
“Valtteri [Bottas], on a lap, got blocked by six cars. But we shouldn’t have been there in the first place. There’s five kilometres of track out there and the car was more than quick enough.
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“At the beginning of the session we were sent out, got overtaken by everyone pushing, and then on our push lap we were overtaking everybody. So it was really not a good session for us.
“If you don’t do things right, you’ll get punished and we got punished for sure. It’s nothing to do with the driver. You’re all out there fighting for yourself.
“We didn’t need to be in that position at that time. For the whole session, it wasn’t good enough from our side.”