George Russell was unable to finish the Formula 1 São Paulo Grand Prix due to problems with his Mercedes. At that time, he was fighting for the last points-scoring positions in a race where the overall performance of the German team was well below expectations.
The #63 admitted that Mercedes had a bad weekend and needs to understand what happened in Interlagos: ‘It’s obvious that we had something very wrong this weekend. We’re still not sure what it was, but the pace simply didn’t exist. Clearly, you don’t go from a podium-worthy car to one that is a second off the pace, so it’s very strange. On Saturday, we thought maybe it was sporadic, but clearly it wasn’t. We were sliding the tires and I think the performance we showed was the maximum with the car as it was.’
Then came the retirement, with technical issues as the cause, as Russell explained: ‘In the end, we were struggling with high oil temperatures in the power unit, which led us to retire. That completed what was a difficult day. We now need to go back to the factory, regroup, and work on what we did to resolve it before the last two races of the season.’
