George Russell has revealed how former Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton was riled up by a prank played by the Silver Arrows’ engineers when the Brit visited the team garage at the 2017 Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
At the time, Russell was competing in the GP3 Series and was already earmarked as a potential star of the future for Mercedes. The Norfolk-born racer won the championship that year by an impressive 79 points, before following it up by beating Lando Norris and Alex Albon to the Formula Two crown as a rookie.
Upon his first visit to the Mercedes garage in 2017, Mercedes engineers had covered the garage in photos of Hamilton posing with a young Russell. However, it was the seven-time world champion, rather than the development driver, who was most embarrassed by the prank.
“First time we met each other would have been… I came to Baku, 2017, that probably was the first time that we met each other,” Russell in a Mercedes-produced video, sitting alongside race engineer Marcus Dudley.
“I guess I was like the annoying kid as the reserve driver around the office, getting in people’s way and whatnot. I remember in Baku, it was my first race with you guys, in 2017. Evan, one of our engineers, had printed off a photo of Lewis and I from when I was, like, 10 years old.
“And he placed it around the whole office. He printed off like 30 pieces of this. And I think Lewis was more annoyed with it than I was. I thought it was great! This was pre-Lewis’s fashion sense, and I don’t think he appreciated it too much.”
Five years later, Russell and Hamilton were reunited as Mercedes team-mates, with the young Brit getting the call-up after an impressive three-season development stint with a struggling Williams team, during which he dominated team-mates Robert Kubica and Nicholas Latifi.
Now, after scoring two wins in each of the past two seasons and losing one to a disqualification in Belgium, Russell feels ready to fight for a title.
“[Last season was] definitely my most solid in terms of performance – most consistent, least mistakes,” he explained after a strong 2025 campaign. “So yeah, on the whole, it has been.
“I definitely know I can – I can mix it with those guys at the top. Max [Verstappen] is obviously the gold standard at the moment. He’s the one that I’d want to go head-to-head with, and I think he’s the only one that people would question. He’s the only driver on the grid that you’d want to be team-mates with to see your competitiveness with.”