George Russell is demanding answers from Mercedes, with both the 25-year-old and Lewis Hamilton having endured a frustrating qualifying in Miami.
Life at the Miami International Autodrome hasn’t been going smoothly for either Mercedes driver this weekend, who’ve both struggled for outright pace.
Mercedes’ issues were summarised by Hamilton’s shocking qualifying, with the 38-year-old having been eliminated in Q2 comfortably.
Hamilton and Russell had a stronger Sunday, but were nevertheless still a long way off of the Red Bulls and Fernando Alonso.
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Russell salvaged sixth in qualifying but was very lucky in Q3, with several drivers having failed to set a competitive lap due to the final 1:30 having been cancelled after Charles Leclerc crashed.
The former Williams driver was fairly despondent after the session and admitted that whilst he’ll “take the result”, the team must answer why the W14 is so poor in Miami.
“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 Sky Sports F1.
“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.
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“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.”
Qualifying pace has been an issue for Mercedes since the start of the new aerodynamic regulations, with Sundays typically being their strongest day of the weekend.
This was once again the case in Miami, with Russell and Hamilton recovering to P4 and P6, respectively.