George Russell is losing more points to his teammate with each passing race, the Formula 1 Spanish Grand Prix proving the latest instalment of woe for the Briton.
Andrea Kimi Antonelli took victory in Monza. A short sentence, but one that was entirely plausible this time two weeks ago. Less so when the announcement came that he would be taking his obligatory engine change grid penalty there, condemning him to a back of the grid start.
What followed in the following 90 minutes or so was a masterclass in racing. It was like watching one of those chess tournaments or random episodes of Countdown where a flock of grown-ups are beaten by a child who knows words that even a well-read person wouldn’t have a clue of. Be in no doubt, this was a generational performance by a prodigy who is proving Mercedes that choosing him to succeed Lewis Hamilton was about as perfect a decision as they could have made.
Hamilton’s own exit from Mercedes came about after years of personal dominance within that team. Beaten only once in four seasons with Nico Rosberg, he then set about stamping his authority within the Silver Arrows by inadvertently putting Rosberg’s replacement, Valtteri Bottas, firmly in his place at the dutiful ‘number 2’. After Bottas was ousted in favour of one of its in-house products in the form of George Russell, Hamilton saw his mantle as the outright lead driver slip, as Russell outscored him in his debut season. And in a total of three seasons, Hamilton was outscored twice. There seemed like a power shift, and it seemed that the fresh-faced Russell was now the future of Mercedes.
His first season as the de facto number one saw him carry the team for much of the season, taking a victory in Canada amid an ongoing struggle to maintain the W16 as a genuine threat at the front, as Antonelli struggled to get to grips with the rough and tumble of Formula 1, sleepwalking from one silly mistake to another as questions began to be raised about his suitability in not only the seat a seven-time World Champion vacated, but in the sport altogether.
Fast forward a year, and Antonelli is on course to become its youngest-ever World Champion, and in the process, give Russell the mantle of being ‘the new Bottas’, when it looked like he was in possession of the ‘golden child’ status befitting the likes of Charles Leclerc at Ferrari. Now he’s being made the subject of AI-generated videos of him looking in the mirror and recoiling in horror as his sprouts a milky-blonde mullet and moustache like that of his Mercedes predecessor, as Toto Wolff dubs Antonelli’s rapid progression something like an “AI agent”.
Naturally, Antonelli has gained confidence with each win, a bit like how most 19-year-olds [wrongly] picked up a similar sense of confidence in how to talk to girls with each new copy of Nuts magazine they bought. Many racing drivers have often struggled on this front, but Russell has never seemed to lack self-belief. On the contrary, I’d say. Even in his more inexperienced and immature days, he always seemed firmly confident of misplaced exoneration for his role in some on-track incidents, and be honest: who’s head wouldn’t swell if you defeated statistically the most successful driver of all-time twice in three seasons?
Personally, I don’t believe that Russell has even questioned his own abilities in the midst of his power struggle with Antonelli. And in truth, he has been the victim of some rotten luck, his retirement in Canada a notable case in point. Even in Zandvoort, a team agreement was the only reason he finished behind Antonelli, having taken a dominant win in the Sprint Race, and overall looked better than Antonelli across the weekend.
But as he sat quietly in the cool down room and subsequent press conference after the race, stewing on what must have felt like a watershed moment of public impotence, he must have wondered if this was the moment that power has started to slip away beyond all realistic reach of getting back, and with that, the Formula 1 World Drivers’ Championship.
Madrid was, of course, a bit of an outlier, having just seen in its debut, with Russell struggling to match Antonelli in qualifying, but with the latter freely admitting he did not deserve his win there. But coming up are circuits Russell has shown his nous at before. Last year at Baku, he battled illness so much that he was in danger of being replaced for the weekend by Bottas, but he battled through to finish second. And in Singapore, he sauntered to victory. Talent isn’t lost overnight, and they are the perfect places for Russell to show none of it is missing.
What he can’t really tackle successfully is the elephant in the room which is that of the fortune that has shone more on Antonelli’s dark brown curls rather than his neat, 90s-style curtains. The racing Gods have not looked favourably on Russell much this year, but even if they begin to look now, the title race may already be over.
Who’s to say that this year was his best opportunity to win it? But even if the championship deficit is too big to claw back, he must now turn the crumbs left and turn it into a moist cake upon which he can feat next year in the shape of another title assault. This was what Rosberg did after being beaten by Hamilton in 2015 – an end-of-season run of victories which set himself up for his title victory in 2016.
A crisis of confidence doesn’t suit George Russell whatsoever, and I very much doubt it will be a look he’ll even try on, not at least in public anyway. If he can show Mercedes, himself, and Antonelli exactly what he is made of, then he has every opportunity to ensure the individual who engraves the name on the World Championship trophy will have to engrave his.
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