George Russell targets 2023 title after debut F1 win

Can George Russell challenge for the world championship next season if Mercedes provides him with a fully competitive car? Given the form he has shown in 2022 with the difficult W13, the answer has to be yes – but to achieve his goal he’ll have to beat team-mate Lewis Hamilton in the same machinery.

Following a three-year apprenticeship with Williams, Russell, 24, was promoted to the big time with Mercedes in 2022,  and he fully expected to have a car with which he could score race victories. After all he’d already had a taste of the top when he replaced the Covid-struck Hamilton at the 2020 Sakhir GP – a race he could have won, had fortune gone his way.

Instead he faced a very different kind of season as his team struggled to fight its way out of the hole it found itself in at  the start of the year with severe porpoising and ride issues.

It’s all relative, of course. A bad Mercedes is still better than most other cars on the grid, and Russell was able to grasp the opportunity to prove beyond all doubt that he deserves his place in the front rank with an impeccable drive to win the penultimate race of the season in Brazil.

With one race to go in Abu Dhabi it ensured Mercedes takes away at least one winner’s trophy from an otherwise barren 2022 campaign. But, perhaps more importantly, it has given the team the  belief that it is on track to challenge for victory in 2023.

“I think it’s such a boost for all of us to recognise that we are on the right track, and improvements and developments we’ve been bringing to the car are the right ones,” Russell tells Motor Sport. “And that’s sort of a brilliant feeling, to know that we are on the route to victory again.

“The mindset now is we can definitely fight for the championship next year. And even if we don’t start off with the fastest car, I’m very confident we’ll have a car that is a lot closer than it was this year. Everyone’s just excited for this winter period when we hit the track for the first time in Bahrain.”

Russell’s maiden victory was a long time coming: he logged his first pole position in July in Hungary, and scored a string of podium finishes, often against the odds. In the first part of the year, he regularly outperformed Hamilton, perhaps because after his Williams struggles he was more tuned in to driving difficult Formula 1 cars than the seven-time champion.

“I think it was a good learning process for George,” says Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff. “It’s also been a lesson in humility for all of us, and not feeling any sense of entitlement. That is something that he has discovered, that you’re joining Mercedes, but not necessarily fighting for a world championship straight from the get-go.”

Russell made huge strides in his three years with Williams. It should pay dividends next season. “I feel like you don’t naturally get any faster,” he says. “Your speed over one lap is your speed over one lap, but you hone your skills in terms of race starts,  tyre management, dealing with dynamic situations, whether it’s the weather, or qualifying situations.

“I’ve taken a good step with my race pace this year. It was difficult, because for the first three years, I was sort of in no-man’s land. I was just racing on my own, doing what I thought was right.

“And you sometimes need that experience of a team-mate to learn from in certain circumstances. You have to make your own mistakes, you’ve got to learn from those. And that was always difficult when I was just on my own. Definitely this  year I think I’ve adapted quite quickly. It’s been a relatively good year personally, but I feel we’ve got a lot more in the locker. So that also gives me a lot of motivation.”

The three Williams years were invaluable for Russell, but he can be forgiven for thinking that he was ready to move up earlier.

Consider his contemporaries, Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen, who ran a season and a bit with Sauber and Toro Rosso respectively before being fast-tracked into the senior teams at both Ferrari  and Red Bull.

It wasn’t quite that easy for Wolff to make such a call on an early graduation with Russell. Not only did the Austrian face the complication of how and when to unload Valtteri Bottas, but having agreed to take Russell the Williams team was determined to keep him for the full three years of the original deal. He was the team’s biggest asset, the man who could pick up priceless points for the Grove outfit.

“I felt ready after year one to make that step,” Russell concedes. “And who knows what would have been had I made that step in 2020? Ultimately I was fully locked-in, and couldn’t really do anything about it, especially when Williams was going through that sales process.”

After that patient wait the move to Mercedes didn’t bring the immediate rewards that he had expected.

“It’s definitely been intense,” he says of 2022. “And I think it’s been quite a unique journey sort of throughout this year, because of the issues we’ve faced, solving one issue, running into a different problem. Dealing with the porpoising, which I’d never even heard of or experienced in my life before.

“These have all been sort of unique challenges, and how we’ve turned the page and really closed that gap to the front two has been quite exciting to see.”

Mercedes first realised that it was in big trouble at the Barcelona test. At that stage the camp still had high hopes for the ‘no-sidepod’ spec that was introduced for the second session in Bahrain, but after  it was run the fundamental issues  remained in the car.

“That’s when I knew it’s going to be a difficult season,” says Russell. “I know from my past experiences of how difficult it is to re-develop a car when you’re starting on the backfoot.

“But I had full confidence in Mercedes, because I truly was so impressed by the engineering and the designers back at the factory. It was on a completely different level to what I was previously used to.”

“Mercedes was on a different level to what I was used to”

There was progress after the difficult early races, but not enough, and addressing the porpoising issue uncovered other problems. It wasn’t until the last part of the season, and the run of flyaway events, that Mercedes began to feel on top of everything.

“Andrew Shovlin described it quite well,” notes Russell. “He said it’s like peeling an onion. The outer layer was the sort of mouldy layer. And we thought as soon as we’ve peeled that off, we’ve got a nice healthy onion underneath. And we kept peeling off these issues.”

Russell knew that race wins would be hard to come but nevertheless he enjoyed an impressive run of top five finishes from Bahrain to Monza, broken only by a first lap retirement at Silverstone after contact with Zhou Guanyu. It was a run that saw him outscore teammate.

Russell insists that is relationship with Lewis Hamilton is solidly professional: “I think we have a lot of dialogue between the two of us. And when we’re talking about certain issues, we’re almost verifying one another. Are you feeling this as well? Yeah, I am feeling this. And it when you’ve got both drivers pushing in the same direction, that really helps the development of the team, of the pace, of the performance.

“And I think that really helps, that we’ve got a really strong and transparent relationship. And I think it helps that we’re both at different points in our career, and I don’t think there’s any sort of ego there from either side.

“We respect one another. And I think that’s really been a big factor into that development that we’ve had as a team this year.”

From the outside it’s appears to be a healthy rivalry: “Absolutely, we’ve not had any scenarios to have any falling outs, we’ve got that good relationship, we’ve always had respect for one another.

“And obviously, we were in a unique position in that we were not fighting for a championship, and our duty was to really try and push the team forward.

“But I think the relationships we’ve built upon this year [is strong] and even if we are fighting for a championship next year, I’m sure we’ll always keep professional.”

Russell says being forced to work together to improve a faltering car has helped forge their partnership: “We’re obviously both very competitive, and we both want to win. Obviously, he wants to beat me, and I want to beat him, that’s only natural from every single racing driver.

“But I think because we are on this journey together, we almost need one another to help along the way. Every year, every situation is different. But I think the team have always been very clear on how important it is that the two of us get along, from their own experiences as well.”

Indeed, it’s very different from the complicated and stressful relationship that Hamilton had with Nico Rosberg, his team mate from 2013 to 2016.

“I guess as a team they look back on that time as some success,” says Russell. “But there was a lot of tension within; there was a bit of disconnect from either side of the garage. Sometimes that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because they were pushing one another, and the engineers were pushing really hard to get the most out of the package.

“On average, we’ve had a car that’s seven-tenths off the pace”

“But I’ve been in situations in the past where I’ve had a team mate where there was a bit of friction, and it’s just not healthy for the team atmosphere to be in that position. I’ve got no intentions to have any sort of gamesmanship, let’s say.”

Russell’s standing as a driver has certainly increased this year, but he’s also impressed off track not least in his involvement with the GPDA, where he took on the role of director of the board replacing Romain Grosjean. Working alongside fellow director Sebastian Vettel and chairman Alex Wurz he says it’s a job that he enjoys.

“To be honest, between all of the 20 drivers we’re pretty united, we’re all pretty vocal. And I think it is a good dynamic that there’s almost two tiers in F1, you’ve got the experienced older generation of Seb, Fernando, Daniel, and then you’ve got myself, Max, Lando, Charles, the sort of younger ones, and we naturally have a closer relationship.

“I think that balance of Sebastian and I with Alex Wurz is great. And it’s a shame that a lot of their work goes under the radar to the outside world. But no one’s looking for an accolade or anything. We’re just here to try and make the sport better, more enjoyable for us as drivers, more enjoyable for the fans, and ultimately a safer sport as well.”

The drivers have talked a lot about the 2022 cars, and what can be done to improve them in the future. “It definitely was the right move to make the change to improve the aerodynamics,” says Russell. “I think the weight factor has obviously been a bit of a negative impact, but I appreciate that we need to continue to evolve the safety aspects.

“I think there is a balance to be struck with continuously adding weight, because obviously, if you were to impact another car, with these cars now, over 800kgs at points in the race, compared with a car that’s 600kgs, you will feel that difference.

“I know when I used to play rugby, you had a big, big bloke who’s 100kgs running towards you versus one who’s 60kgs, trying to tackle them. It’s quite a difference!

“The analysis is ongoing, to strike that right balance. Is it actually safer having cars that don’t have quite such strength but they’re much lighter, or is it better to have a truck of a car, but they’re rock solid? I don’t know.”

The biggest change this year has been the introduction of the cost cap and you can tell that resentment still simmers over the breaking of the cap by arch rival Red Bull: “The cost cap was definitely something that was needed for F1 to level the playing field. And that’s why it’s very important that any teams that have gone over that were punished.

“We could make our car up to half a second quicker almost overnight if you gave us a couple of extra million. A couple of extra million is a huge amount of money in the world of F1 and development.”

Even so Russell is confident that the issues that ruined this season for his team won’t be part of the DNA of next year’s W14 and he hints that the team has identified the root cause of the problems seen in 2022 – although he won’t explain exactly what that was.

“I think we recognise where we went wrong,” he says. “There was one day in the development process in 2021 where we took a decision. And ultimately, that was the wrong decision – nothing to do with sidepods or that philosophy, it was just the direction we took. And it was the wrong one.

“And we’ve now learned exactly where we think we need the car to be placed, and where we need the downforce to be quick over the course of a season. And we’re slowly evolving to that. That’s where all the effort is, we still have improvements to be made. We were also overweight, there’s free lap time there, and we need to shave that off.

“And if we get everything right, there’s no reason why we can’t be back in the game. When you look at our rate of development, and how we’ve closed that gap, there’s no reason to think why we can’t be in that fight next year.”

“On average, we’ve had a car that’s seven-tenths off the pace. And we were sort of in that fight for second in the drivers’ championship. But we’re not content with that, and we want more. For sure the car isn’t where it wants to be. But equally I’m not where I want to be either, I wanted to have more performance, and I still feel like I can deliver more performance.

“And I’m still definitely growing, and trying to become a more complete driver.”