Mercedes driver George Russell made a bold request to the team in order to have him swapped with Lewis Hamilton in Monaco. James Allison, the Mercedes top dog, explained how the team has handled the situation, and laughed at the request.
Russell, who was being pursued by Charles Leclerc of Ferrari, requested to safeguard his position after receiving a five-second time penalty.
Admittedly, the young Briton received the penalty for rejoining the track unsafely after a pit stop. As he came out of the pitlane, he got hit by Sergio Perez coming from behind.
In the end, the 24-year-old finished the race in P5, a place behind Hamilton. However, Russell believes he could’ve had a better finish in Monaco, as “P3 was almost guaranteed” for him.
Allison laughs off at Russell’s request
As the pitlane incident left Russell behind Alpine’s Esteban Ocon and teammate Lewis Hamilton, he asked his team to swap him in order to protect his lead over the Monegasque.
After he asked for the swap on the radio, team principal Toto Wolff declined it given the fact that the W14 had enough pace to keep the SF-23 of Leclerc away from the five seconds window.
Speaking on the request, Allison revealed in the Mercedes Race Debrief video on YouTube, “This is very much a hypothetical request from George. I think he knew when he asked that this was going to be a very difficult thing to execute.”
“And in any case, it was rendered pretty rapidly because it was pretty obvious that George had the pace to put a gap between him and Leclerc in any case,” concluded the Technical Director of the Mercedes AMG F1 team.
Monaco wasn’t the first time Russell tried this
The former Williams driver has tried sending requests like this for quite some time now. Leaving aside the Monte Carlo race, George Russell also put the team in a similar situation in Spa Francorchamps last year and again in Bahrain at the start of the season.
Despite bottling the start at the race start in Bahrain this year, the 25-year-old requested the team to invert the car after a few laps saying he was faster than Hamilton. The same attitude was seen in Australia and in Saudi Arabia, and vice versa.
All in all, these repeated patterns of Russell’s ‘arrogant’ and selfish nature have started to annoy many F1 fans as they began to call out the behaviors regardless they were intentional or not.
