George Russell didn’t think Mercedes could have done anything more in terms of result in F1 Italian GP, as Andrea Kimi Antonelli felt 50-50 after the race.
Even though he managed to challenge Charles Leclerc at the start of F1 Italian GP at Monza, there was nothing more Mercedes’ Russell could have managed in the end. Once the Monegasque got in a rhythm, he could comfortably keep the Brit behind at a distance.
In fact, Russell had to cover Lewis Hamilton, who climbed up from 10th to sixth in handful of laps. For some reason, Mercedes didn’t have enough pace to do anything more than they did. “It was quite fun at the beginning, trying to get past Charles but they just had substantially more speed on the straight than us which made it pretty challenging,” Russell said to media. “From then on in, P5 was the maximum.
“If you are driving on your own to go 55 laps in quickest time possible, it was quite a late stop, it was just nobody else pitted because the midfield was going long and then Lewis forced me to pit. But actually, the hard tyre was really resilient. We saw how long Albon went and number of drivers went, you could have comfortably have pitted earlier,” summed up Russell.
Teammate Antonelli did not have a good start and dropped behind Yuki Tsunoda in 10th. It took a while to get through the Japanese driver, which allowed Gabriel Bortoleto and Fernando Alonso to create a decent gap. But the Italian managed to recover the places via strategy.
By that time, Hamilton already gained on him. Since Alonso suffered a DNF, he only had to cover Bortoleto which he did. But at the latter stages, Alexander Albon got to him rather quickly. A moment at Curva Grande resulted in a 5s time penalty for forcing a driver off.
He dropped to ninth as a result. He scored points but time loss in FP2 hurt him eventually. “I need to re-look, but it didn’t look too bad to me,” said Antonelli on the Albon incident. “Apparently, I pushed him [Albon] off track. I don’t know, to be honest. I need to re-look at it. It’s a shame, but I think the race was compromised with the start. I got wheelspin straight away and just lost a lot of places.
“I’m happy about the quali pace, which was strong. It’s just a shame with the start, as I said, that I made a mistake and lost a lot of places. I just need to work on that and try to do better in Baku. Overall, I am obviously, disappointed. Hopefully, we can keep the same momentum in qualifying and try to use race pace in the race. As I said, the quali pace was better, which was good.
“I was much closer to George. But in the race, I didn’t do long runs in FP2 because of my mistakes. I wasn’t really prepared for the race. That also didn’t help. Looking to the next few races, it’s going to be important to have a clean weekend from FP1 all the way to FP3 in order to be ready for qualifying and then races. When you miss a full practice, especially in FP2, which is usually quite important, because the track is the closest in terms of time and temperature to qualifying.
“But also for long runs, because in FP1, you do long runs, but the track is usually quite green. So, the deg is a bit different, while FP2 is more representative. I didn’t do the long run in the most important session. I did a long run in FP3, but it was with a soft tyre, which was quite irrelevant. That was penalising, mostly for the race. On medium, I felt pretty good, to be honest, with the car.
“On hard, I struggled with the rear. I had instability in medium-high speed corners. I struggled overall a little bit with the rear support,” summed up Antonelli, as team boss Toto Wolff termed his race as ‘underwhelming’, even though he still supports the youngster to come through as time progresses.
It is the first instance for Wolff to publicly talk down Antonelli’s performance. “Underwhelming this weekend, underwhelming,” said Wolff. “He can’t put the car in the gravel bed and then to expect to be there. All of the race was underwhelming. Doesn’t change anything on my support and confidence in his future, because I believe he’s going to be very, very, very good. But, today was underwhelming.”
Wolff praised the drive by Max Verstappen and Red Bull’s turnaround to win dominantly. He thought Mercedes will do slightly better but it wasn’t to be. The low degradation didn’t help either as they were limited by strategy in the end, as was the case for everybody else around them.
“It was a tough day, you can clearly see that there is only one guy that makes everybody else look a bit bad, a bit stupid,” said Wolff. “The turnaround that they (Red Bull) have made wasn’t written off, and here we go; Max disappears in the distance. And that’s why everybody needs to, you know, we need to all grind ourselves by the nose and shake it a bit.
“Not shake, policy. To teach. Not shake it a bit. You shake the nose a bit. Congratulations. Good engineering, good driving, that’s the explanation. We have opted not to, so much emphasize anymore the remaining races this year. But nevertheless, track characteristics should have been a little bit more good for us. And we didn’t perform on the level that we should have.
“I think today was a very straightforward one-stop. And it wouldn’t have changed our position because the cars with the straightline speed, the more we came close, we lose the tyres. So, the other way round, it wouldn’t have made a difference either. So, it was also way of thinking about to stop Lewis, if he was try to undercut us and there was no room to have a better position.”
Here’s what Alexander Albon said
Here’s how F1 Italian GP panned out
