George Russell started 2026 as a favorite to win the Formula 1 drivers’ title, especially after he converted pole position into victory at the first Grand Prix of the year, in Australia.
He did that again in the last Grand Prix, in Austria, but the six races in between were rocky.
Mercedes has had the dominant car this year, and Russell’s teammate, Kimi Antonelli, won the five races after Australia, moving into first place in the drivers’ championship. Russell was undone by a virtual safety car period in Japan after another driver crashed, struggled in Miami and Monaco, and suffered a mechanical failure in Canada.
“It’s been a tough couple of months with some really tricky races, with races that felt like everything was going against me, then some races with some tough performances,” he said last Sunday in Austria.
Last year he finished fourth in the championship and, after Monaco in June, Russell fell to third in the championship, 68 points behind Antonelli.
“It hasn’t been to the level I would have hoped, but the good thing is we have a great racecar underneath us,” he said.
Russell said he accepted fault for some of the setbacks.
“Formula 1 is so challenging,” he said. “You’ve got to get the driving style in tune with the tires on a given day, based on the track temperature, work with the setup that you’ve curated with your engineers, everything has to click with energy management — it only takes one thing to be out to throw it all off. And for me, at the start of the season, everything was clicking. I then had some bad luck, a bit of frustration, and then for a couple of races nothing was clicking.”
Russell struggled for speed in Miami and Monaco, but adopted a “simple mind-set” after recognizing he was overthinking, heightened by the unusual breaks in the schedule after the races were canceled in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia because of the war in Iran.
“I think we were doing things differently because things were going wrong,” he said. “And we had too much time on our hands to think. You’re trying to always improve, and every single driver on this grid, you’re looking for that last 0.1 percent of improvement. But sometimes if you put so much effort on that 0.1 percent, the 99.9 percent you don’t focus on as much.
“I love using like tennis analogies because I follow the sport a lot. Djokovic was not as competitive as Nadal on clay,” he said about Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, who won the clay-court French Open 14 times. “And if he spent his whole off season trying to improve on clay for that one tournament, he might compromise the other three quarters of the season. I can argue that’s probably what happened to me at one point. I’ve gone back, simple mind, doing what I know works best for me, trusting my intuition.”
The self-assured Russell conceded that “this has been probably the first season I can remember for 10 plus years that I have struggled a bit with performance at a couple of races, and that’s difficult to keep the confidence sometimes.”
Russell said the last race, in Barcelona, was “probably the most important weekend of my year.”
“It was maybe a race where it was the least amount of confidence I’ve had going into practice,” he said. “And I was quickest every single lap of the weekend on Friday and Saturday. That made me very proud knowing I can switch it on, and I need to just find that click. I just need to get everything in that right window. And I know my driving will take me to where it needs to go.
“And that was a really great reminder. I hadn’t just forgotten how to drive in a tough Monaco and a tough Miami. But sometimes you feel like you have. And then you come back and you’re like, ‘No, I’ve not forgotten how to drive.’”
In Barcelona, he took pole position and finished second. In Austria, he ended a six-race winless drought and moved into second place in the championship, reducing Antonelli’s advantage to 40 points.
“To get the last two poles, to get the win here this weekend, especially on a track which I don’t think is so suited to me, I’m really, really proud,” he said in Austria.
Toto Wolff, the Mercedes team principal who has known Russell for over a decade, has no doubt that Russell is tenacious.
“If there’s one guy that I would choose in this paddock in terms of resilience and determination, that would be George,” Wolff said in May. “He’s had to overcome adversity previously, whether it’s from karting or junior formulas, and he’s not going to give up that fight. The best ones, they don’t end up in Formula 1 because they just happen to win a few races, they end up there because they have that resilience.”
Russell cited the recent resurgence of his former Mercedes teammate, Lewis Hamilton of Ferrari, who won six of his seven drivers’ titles with Mercedes. Hamilton finished second at the Monaco and Canada Grands Prix and then won the next race in Barcelona, his first win in almost two years.
“You look at Lewis, everyone wrote him off,” Russell said. “Is he too old? Is he as passionate as ever? Blah de blah de blah. Suddenly he’s got his click back. Everything is in sync, and the performances have come in easily. ”
It helped Russell to focus his mind elsewhere during his downtime.
“I love being at sea, I love being in the sea,” said Russell, who has his own boat that he takes along the French Riviera. “When I swim or I go diving in the sea, I feel like I’m disconnected from this life. When I do free-diving, you’ve got to lie in the water, you’ve got to do breathing techniques to lower your heart rate, you’ve got to focus on the technique. You’ve got to be calm, not panic.”
“I live such a fast-paced life, I need that calmness to counterbalance,” he said.
For the British Grand Prix at the Silverstone Circuit, he is aiming to be the third English driver in a row to win their home race, after Hamilton in 2024 and Lando Norris of McLaren in 2025.
“I’ll be going for it,” Russell said. “I’m going for it every single year. It’s been a race that hasn’t been so kind to me.”
Russell said he attended his first Grand Prix, which was at Silverstone, when he was 10- years old, and he certainly could not have imagined that someday he “would be lining up on that grid all these years later.
“My first car race was there, my first race win, the first time I ever drove an F1 car. There’s just so many special memories, then the fans are just so pure. It’s a festival. It’s just a really special race.”
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