Mercedes’ pace was actually good enough to get both Formula 1 cars into Q3 in Hungary, but George Russell had to throw in the towel after Q1. The first of three sessions was chaotic, with a brief rain shower and a red flag because of Sergio Perez’s accident. In the end, Russell only finished 17th because he had too little fuel in his car.
Russell stayed in the pits while many drivers went out onto the track to improve their times. Valtteri Bottas in the Sauber put Russell in the danger zone from which he could not escape. But who is to blame for the Mercedes disaster?
Russell and team boss Toto Wolff share the blame between the driver and the team. Russell says: “In the beginning it was my fault. I didn’t think it would rain again and thought the track would get faster.”
“I was doing an easy lap and then suddenly it started raining. That was the most important lap,” Russell continues. “But it didn’t matter because at the end the track was the fastest and we didn’t have any fuel left in the car to finish the session. I don’t know what happened, it was a total disaster.”
Russell stressed that no one in the team should lose focus and that he now needs to sit down with everyone responsible to understand what happened. “We had the car to fight for the top three, we shouldn’t have been out after Q1. Lewis (Hamilton) just made it into Q3.”
“I’m really angry”
“I’m really angry because I had a much faster car and we can’t just throw away chances like that,” the Briton continued. “It’s going to be a tough race. We still have a chance to get through and maybe fight for the top 6. But it won’t be easy from 16th place.”
After the difficult qualifying, Wolff also takes the entire team to task.
He told “Sky”: “We completely underperformed in this session. First we had a slow lap at the beginning, which George approached too conservatively. At the same time, Lewis put in a mega lap.”
“Then it was probably 70 percent a team error that we gave him too little fuel. Actually, we had planned one fast lap, one slow lap, one fast lap. But he drove three fast laps and that cost us perhaps the better position in the end. It is what it is.”
“Overall, it was the team performance after a good Silverstone weekend and the good races before that that led to this setback.” Wolff explains why Russell went out on the track so early: “We discussed it for a long time and knew that the track conditions would improve and that the lap would come at the end rather than at the beginning. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t get into a traffic situation there.”
“It wasn’t a big mistake, but we should have used a bit more fuel for the lap, which isn’t much,” the Mercedes team boss clarified. “Or we should have clearly told him to drive slowly and not do three fast laps in a row, because that cost us 45 seconds in the end.”
Source: www.sport.de
