George Russell has said that team-mate Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s struggles in recent Formula 1 races have been exaggerated, with much of it down to Mercedes‘ on-track issues.
The Italian teenager has not scored a single point since taking his maiden podium finish in Canada back in June, with Antonelli himself having been critical of his own performances.
Last week in Belgium, the 18-year-old failed to make it through the first part of qualifying for both the Sprint and full Grand Prix, which inevitably led to two difficult races.
But Antonelli has undoubtedly performed well for the most part, particularly given his rookie status, and still sits in seventh place in the Drivers’ Championship with one podium to his name.
Russell is adamant that many of Antonelli’s problems have coincided with the W16’s downturn in performance, telling media including Motorsport Week that, in fact, the gaps between them are smaller now than they were when the car was more competitive.
“I think as a young driver, you’ve got to look at it objectively, which is in terms of his own personal performance,” he said ahead of this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix.
“You can argue he’s probably actually performing better than he did at the start of the year when you look at the deficit in terms of lap time. It’s just the differences.
“In Canada, when we were on pole, he was in fourth place, over half a second behind. In Spa, he was only three times behind me. But that was the difference between out in Q1 or getting through to Q3.
“The team have made it very clear he shouldn’t worry about those results. He’s still done a very good job considering his experience. It’s the car that has brought us both backwards.
“That’s, of course, very difficult to accept when you’re in that position. But it’s never easy when the car is not performing as you expect.”
Antonelli’s confidence will be ‘boosted’ if Mercedes can rectify its problems
Mercedes’ Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin pinned the W16’s recent problems on Antonelli’s results suffering earlier this week.
He has reiterated that claims in Budapest, citing that it is not working on a specific remedy for Antonelli’s woe, but intimated that his race engineer Peter Bonnington is aware that he can work on helping his driver extract the best from the car.
“Not specific things that we’re doing in that regard [technically], other than Bono, who’s engineering that car, knows that if we can give him a stable car his performance will improve,” he explained.
Shovlin also repeated his claim that Russell’s wealth of experience in F1 is what is enabling him to deal with the recent setbacks that have caught his rookie team-mate out.
“The reality is both drivers have slipped backwards, but George has all his years in Formula 1 to fall back on and that’s been helping him in qualifying,” he added.
“Kimi doesn’t have that database of knowledge and how to drive around problems and it’s probably hurt him a bit more.
“It’s an engineering problem, but if we can solve that it will certainly boost Kimi’s confidence in himself.”
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