George Russell has told his Mercedes team to “do it straight away or don’t do it at all” after the Silver Arrows left their star driver frustrated with indecisive team orders at the Mexican Grand Prix.
Russell found himself running behind team-mate Kimi Antonelli during the second half of Sunday’s race at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, with Oliver Bearman in his sights and McLaren star Oscar Piastri hunting him down from behind.
The 27-year-old Brit lodged his first request to be let past Antonelli on lap 35, and made another on lap 38, offering to hand the position back to his team-mate if his attack on Bearman was unsuccessful.
After some more tense radio communications with engineer Marcus Dudley, he was finally let through on lap 41. From there, he fought to reel in the Haas racer in fourth place, but was unable to do so and lost a spot to Piastri, who made a brave lunge at Turn One on lap 60. Russell then handed sixth place back to Antonelli.
Russell expressed his frustrations after the chequered flag. “Yeah, I mean, I had a lot of pace in those laps and would have been able to attack Ollie, who had no DRS,” he said to Sky Sports F1. “Obviously, I was in the DRS train behind Kimi. I think we left it 10 laps.
“By that point, my tyres overheated, my brakes were overheating. The engine was overheating. So by that point, there was sort of no point in doing it. It was either do it straight away or don’t do it at all. So in the end, we deserve to finish where we did. A bit frustrating.”
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Russell wasn’t the only driver frustrated with Mercedes’ handling of the situation, although his reasoning was different from team-mate Antonelli’s. The teenager was caught off guard when Peter Bonnington told him to move over and didn’t understand the need for the request at the time.
“Well, I didn’t know he was asking that on the radio,” Antonelli explained after climbing out of the car. “I just got the information from the team to make the swap into T4, which kind of caught me by surprise initially.
“But, yeah, I mean, I respect their decision. Obviously, we need to review, and I would like to understand the reason behind the decision in order to move forward and then, yeah, now we’ll focus on to Brazil.”
