George Russell, Mercedes Formula 1 driver, expressed his frustration with the team. He felt “angry” with his Q1 elimination at the Hungarian Grand Prix qualifying.
The British driver called out the team for its “disaster” management, which dropped him into 17th place. It stripped his chances of taking a great start.
Red Bull driver, Sergio Perez, went into barriers which put a red flag on the field just ahead of light rain intensification. The circuit damped out before the session could resume after the crash.
Mercedes decided to put Russell on track to improve his time for qualifying. He managed to secure 10th place but was unable to take advantage of the opportunity to progress in the subsequent qualifying sessions. Ultimately, he had to withdraw due to insufficient fuel in the car, which hindered his performance on the track.
It left him unable to keep his position on the qualifying grid, which he lost to Valtteri Bottas pushing him to the elimination zone.
Russell took responsibility for not making the most of the time available. However, he expressed his frustration with the decision to put less fuel in the car.
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“It was on me at the beginning. I didn’t think it was going to rain again so I just thought, ‘the track will get quicker’,” Russell explained.
“I took it easy on lap one and suddenly it started raining and that was the most important lap. But it didn’t matter, the end was the quickest and we had no fuel in the car to finish the session.
“No idea how that happened, and a total disaster.”
Russell accuses the team of “over-optimising” and not adjusting according to the conditions at hand.
“You can never take your eye off the ball. I think we need to have a proper sit-down as a team to understand what’s going on,” he added.
“We’ve got the car to be fighting for the top three, we shouldn’t be standing here out of Q1. Lewis only just scraped through into Q3.
“I’m really quite angry right now because we’ve got such a fast car and we can’t be throwing away opportunities like this. [It’ll be] a difficult race. We will still be able to come through, maybe fight for the top six, but from P16 it’s not going to be easy.”
