“We weren’t wealthy like some F1 drivers,” George Russell recounts childhood memories that were difficult to deal with
George Russell talked about the hardships of his childhood and his father's strictness in his latest interview.
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The making of a Formula 1 driver requires sweat, grit and lots of money. It is often seen that the racers who enter into the pinnacle of motorsports are either sons or grandsons of famous racers like Mick Schumacher and Max Verstappen, or they come from rich families such as Lando Norris. But there are very rare cases such as George Russell‘s, where the Briton had to work his way up from a very mediocre family to get to where he is today. In a recent interview, George Russell recollected the hardships of his childhood as he toiled day in and day out to reach the top on his own merit.
At 25 years of age, George Russell has accomplished enormous feats in the field of racing as he is now of the Mercedes drivers performing alongside his childhood idol Lewis Hamilton. But when Russell was young, he had to live in a mobile home, and he would not get to see his father, Steve Russell, for months at a stretch. This is because Steve was struggling to establish a business so that he could pay for his son’s karting career at the time.
Russell is not the first one in his family to go for racing as a career move. His brother Benjy was also into karting, and became national champion and later world champion in the sport. Benjy served as George’s mentor for a long time as he was past the age of pursuing motorsports as a profession. Speaking of his childhood, George Russell mentioned, “My earliest memories are of living in a mobile home while my parents built a house in a field in the middle of nowhere, near Wisbech in Cambridgeshire.”
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George Russell talked about his father’s strictness that shaped him to be a better driver
As he was never born with a silver spoon, George Russell’s family struggled a lot to keep up the expenses of his training to become a racer. And thus, he has some huge expectations to live up to, which became quite difficult to live with, at times.
George Russell spoke on his father being hard on him, “Dad has always been hard on the ones he loves. As a young kid, that was difficult to deal with. The pressure didn’t just filter down to me, it affected the whole family. We weren’t poor but we weren’t wealthy like the families of some F1 racing drivers now. When I drove well, there were celebrations and the mood was great but because everyone was so emotionally and financially invested, when I suffered a poor weekend the mood was bad.“
Now, George Russell has reached a point in his career where he has a winning Mercedes to back him, and he hopes to get to the top of the grid very soon in the upcoming races. He had his debut Grand Prix victory last year, at the Sao Paulo GP, where he became the only Merc drive to win a race last season as Lewis Hamilton failed to attain victory throughout the year.
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Riddhi Mondal
(1821 Articles Published)