George Russell is set for a power unit change ahead of Sunday’s Formula 1 Hungarian Grand Prix after Mercedes identified an issue in the dying seconds of Q3.
Russell endured a challenging qualifying session at the Hungaroring, struggling to match the pace of teammate Kimi Antonelli.
Trailling at around half a second behind, the Briton would befall yet more reliability misfortune that has blighted his season.
In the closing seconds of Q3, Mercedes radioed Russell after he had set his lap time to order him to stop on circuit.
Concerns were initially raised that this could be due to a fuel discrepancy; however, Mercedes has confirmed that a water leak was the cause.
In a statement, Mercedes confirmed it will change Russell’s power unit ahead of Sunday’s race, but incur no penalty as it falls within his season allocation.
“During George’s final lap in Q3, we detected a loss of water pressure on his car and instructed him to stop as a precaution once he had completed the lap”, the statement said.
“Following further inspection, we have elected to change his power unit ahead of tomorrow’s race, moving to his fourth unit of the season and thus within his season allocation.
“As the change is also being made to replace a damaged component with one of the same specification, George will incur no grid penalty.”
George Russell details reliability issues
Speaking after the session, Russell detailed his latest reliability woe, revealing when he knew the problem materialised.
” We just had a weird water leak, hit a bump at turn 4, the lap was feeling good until then and then suddenly the lap wasn’t.” he said to media after qualifying.
“so I didn’t think much of it, and the team told me the water was spraying over my tyres, because as soon as we saw it in the data, the water leak, suddenly my tyre temperatures got really cold on the rear so I don’t think much more…top 3 definitely not possible but maybe a few positions higher would have been there.
Despite his issues, Russell is confident of a good result on race day, highlghting Mercedes’ long run pace.
Well I think our assessment after FP2 yesterday was we were about 7 tenths off in qualy pace and we had the quickest race pace, ” he said.
“So that tells you it’s not a car problem, it’s a tyre problem, and I guess we’ll answer the question tomorrow if we’ve struck the right balance between the tyre heating for qualy versus the race but starting in P7, it’ll be difficult.”
This latest reliability issue is yet another example of the racing gods looking unkindly on Russell. After his first lap exit in Spa caused by a power unit issue, a water leak in qualifying in Hungary sees his run of bad luck continue.
The saving grace in this nightmare scenario is that his replacement power unit falls within his annual allocation, preventing a grid penalty. But after struggling relative to Antonelli all weekend, Russell faces an uphill battle to salvage his weekend.
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