George Russell delivered one of the best performances of his career in the previous race at Spa-Francorchamps as he took charge of his own strategy and won the Grand Prix on 34-lap old tires. While he was unfortunately disqualified after the race, F1 commentator David Croft believes the Briton could win more races in the second half of the season.
Russell, who pitted on lap 10 of 44 for hard tires, looked set for a two-stop strategy like others running in the lead group. However, midway through the race, he told Mercedes that they should target a one-stop strategy instead.
The 26-year-old made the bold call and eventually made it work by preventing his teammate Lewis Hamilton from overtaking him on much fresh rubber in the closing laps of the race. It even earned him the title of ‘tire whisperer’ from team principal Toto Wolff as he came back into the pits.
However, a regulatory post-race inspection revealed that Russell’s car was 1.5 kg underweight compared to the required minimum weight of the car (798 kg), after removing the 2.8 liters of leftover fuel. As a result, the #63 driver was disqualified and Hamilton got promoted from P2 to P1. But according to Croft, this doesn’t take away anything from Russell’s incredible performance.
“Lewis didn’t have much of a chance to get past at all so that was that was good driving by George. So don’t count him out of making more drives like that in the future as well”, Croft said on the Sky Sports F1 podcast.
Croft’s belief that Russell could win more races stems from the fact that he was able to successfully deal with a charging seven-time champion, whom he expected to breeze past Russell on newer hard tires.
However, the Sky Sports commentator felt good about the fact that Mercedes now can fight for podiums and wins and both drivers are maximizing the improved pace of the W15.
Mercedes seems to be finally on top of the ground-effect regulations
Matt Baker also asked Croft if they could now expect Mercedes to constantly challenge for race wins in the second half of the season. In response, Croft referred to Mercedes’ trackside engineering director, Andrew Shovlin’s previous comments.
He explained that Shovlin spoke about Mercedes finally seeing more correlation between their wind tunnel and CFD data and what they observe on the track. The Brackley outfit have lacked this correlation since the start of the ground-effect era.
According to Shovlin, Mercedes now has a more solid and predictable foundation for its car at the start of the weekend which they can then adapt as the weekend goes on.
