Toto Wolff: George Russell may have stayed at Williams ‘a year too long’
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George Russell
George Russell had raised eyebrows in his Mercedes cameo at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix: He was consistently faster than senior (and regular driver) teammate, Valtteri Bottas. Throughout 2021, he consistently out-qualified and outperformed his teammate, Nicholas Latifi, and turned in some really impressive results, giving him the moniker ‘Mr. Saturday’.
In 2022, his performances have continued their upward trend. He’s ahead of Lewis Hamilton (his teammate) in the Driver’s championship, as well as Carlos Sainz. In his first year at Mercedes, he has taken his first pole position, his first win (both of them a first for the team in 2022) and has outscored his seven-time world champion teammate. Quite impressive.
As per Motorsport.com, Mercedes’ team principal Toto Wolff thought of his first meeting with Russell after Sunday’s Brazilian Grand Prix: “I thought about it at the end of the race, when he walked in as a 16-year-old with his suit and his tie and his PowerPoint presentation. He’s the first of our new junior programme that has won a race.”
Russell did everything that the team had asked of him: “Obviously Lewis has been there forever, and is the most successful of the ones that have graduated from our junior academy. But six years later, [Russell is] a grand prix race winner. We’ve always set hard targets. You’ve got to win GP3, you’ve got to win F2, and he did that in his rookie seasons.”
Toto Wolff: George Russell a ‘deserving Grand Prix winner’ now
Russell’s weekend in Brazil was almost perfect and perhaps seemed too good to be true. He had beached his car in the gravel in Friday qualifying (where he qualified P3), but quickly made up for that by overtaking Max Verstappen to win the sprint race, and then held off his teammate to win the feature race.
With how impressive Russell has been in 2022, it leaves you wondering if the team could have promoted him earlier, and of how he would have fared in such a situation. Toto Wolff did concede that he might have stayed at Williams a bit too long: “And then I guess at Williams, it was the best schooling he could have had, maybe a year too long.”
But according to the Austrian, now the most relevant thing is that Russell is a ‘Grand Prix winner’ – and a deserving one at that. Certainly, he is where he belongs, and one wonders what lies in his future.
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Aniket Tripathi
(1002 Articles Published)