George Russell breaks silence on Mercedes upgrades after testing them out

George Russell currently finds himself sixth in the Drivers' Championship and 16 points behind Lewis Hamilton.

Despite having finished fourth at the Miami Grand Prix, Mercedes’ George Russell appeared to be pretty frustrated with how his weekend went, with the Briton having admitted that the team have a “few questions that need answering”.

Given how challenging qualifying was for Mercedes, Russell actually secured himself a great starting spot for Sunday’s fifth race of the season, with the 25-year-old having claimed sixth on the grid.

This was drastically better than Lewis Hamilton who could only manage 13th, after being eliminated in Q2 on American soil for the first time in his Formula 1 career.

Russell remained frustrated after qualifying, though, with him having labelled his starting position as “very flattering”.

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“I wouldn’t necessarily say quite pleased, of course I’ll take the result, it’s a very flattering result for the performance that we showed. I did a really decent lap in Q2 to just scrape through, just to get into Q3 and that’s not where we should be,” Russell told the official Formula 1 website.

“Everybody is working so, so hard to bring more performance to the car, it’s definitely not for a lack of effort and it’s just not coming to us at the moment. So there’s a lot to think about. A few questions that need answering. It’s a theme of us that we generally have a better Sunday than we do on Saturday.

“Obviously got the Alpine and Haas around us, hopefully we can get past them, and Ferrari tend to struggle a bit more on Sunday.

“We’ll focus on tomorrow, but we need to think about the bigger picture and how we’re gonna bring that fight to the guys at the top. Everybody is working so hard to get up there. We’ll try and put in a fight with whoever is around us, but we’ll see what we can do.”

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As has been the case for Mercedes throughout the new aerodynamic era, they were considerably better on Sunday, with their race pace having arguably put them third in the pecking order.

Russell did well to finish fourth whilst Hamilton recovered to sixth, with Mercedes now being just six points behind Aston Martin in the Constructors’ Championship.

The Silver Arrows can also now look forward to the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, where the Germans will be using their new concept for the first time.

Russell has warned, though, that the “world” won’t change at the next race, with Red Bull still set to be comfortably superior.

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“There is a lot of expectation around Imola but everyone is moving forwards and bringing upgrades,” he told F1 Nation.

“I’d like to think it can transform things but this is F1, it’s never that straightforward. I have driven with the new upgrades in the sim, but the sim is not reality.

“Don’t expect the world to change at Imola. Red Bull are still going to be the quickest. At the end of the day, I don’t care where we are, we’re chasing them and we want to beat them.”