Belgian GP in Spa, a nightmare weekend for George Russell
The first-lap incident at the Belgian GP immediately knocked George Russell out of contention, once again putting him 50 points behind his teammate Andrea Kimi Antonelli. Beyond the unfortunate dynamics of his retirement after contact with Lewis Hamilton at Les Combes, the Mercedes driver raised his voice with the team, first complaining via radio about the battery charge being completely at zero on the long Kemmel straight – a situation that exposed him to overtakes from some rivals, causing him to fall back until the crash – and then even asking in post-GP interviews for “an equal car” to his teammate’s.
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Indeed, for two weekends now, the 28-year-old has been complaining about an excessive loss of performance on the straight, reporting power unit problems that, however, at Silverstone, Toto Wolff had categorically denied, even in a radio intervention at the end of the race. In Spa, the team’s attitude changed somewhat, given a certain difficulty in truly understanding the “reasoning” of the artificial intelligence software that regulates the delivery of electrical power, based on the driver’s driving style. This is how, to every imperceptible variation in accelerator pedal pressure compared to predictions, a rather different response from the power unit can correspond in terms of battery energy management (as also explained by Federico Albano after the Spa GP).
The Mercedes engineer’s answers
But what really happened to George Russell (and partly to Kimi Antonelli) in Belgium? Mercedes’ deputy technical director Simone Resta explains in the usual Mercedes technical debriefing: “George’s situation is quite unfortunate, as he had contact after Turn 5 and practically retired on the very first lap of the race. Furthermore, we encountered some problems with the energy delivery on his car, and this is something we absolutely need to fully understand and resolve before the next GP. There have been many questions regarding the difficulties Russell is facing… It all started at Silverstone, where we began to notice some differences in hybrid management between our two cars“.
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“We have carried out numerous analyses – continues the Mercedes engineer – and we have come to the conclusion that one of the main factors is related to driving style, or rather the difference in driving style between the two cars. George has thoroughly studied the matter and managed to modify and adapt it for Spa, but we can still notice some small differences. What happened at the start instead? Essentially, we had a software problem on both cars, which led to reaching the energy recovery limit already at the first corner. Due to this situation, we had a power delivery problem from the first to the fifth corner. This affected both George Russell and Kimi Antonelli, and we saw both of them lose ground after a good start.”
