George Russell admits he didn’t do ‘good enough job’ with Mercedes at Azerbaijan F1 GP

Mercedes driver George Russell has said that he didn't do a 'good enough' job in the 2023 Azerbaijan GP qualifying session, as he failed to reach Q3.

The young Briton could only manage a P11, narrowly missing the Q3 by 0.004s. Interestingly, both Mercedes drivers Russell and Lewis Hamilton struggled during the session, and it was the seven-time world champion edging out his young teammate.

Accepting responsibility for his failure, George Russell tweeted that he's looking forward to a second crack at qualifying in the Sprint Shootout:

"Didn’t do a good enough job today and paid the price. Second chance tomorrow."

---

"We’re not fast enough this weekend" - George Russell

George Russell said that the car is not as fast this weekend as the team had expected it to. The Mercedes driver told F1.com:

“Well, we’re not fast enough this weekend. Obviously, I would have loved to have been in Q3, but I was giving it everything. The lap was strong, I made a mistake in my last one, which may have just crept me into Q3, but I don’t think we’d have been able to qualify much higher than P8.

"It’s a funny sport this one, sometimes, going from qualifying on the front row (in Australia) to myself being out in Q2 and Lewis just getting in with P10 (in Q2). We’ve got another chance tomorrow, but it's not an ideal Friday, for sure.”

He continued:

“I think right now we wouldn’t really know what to change to find the pace we need around this track. It’s definitely a unique one, definitely an outlier, compared to the first three races we’ve been to.

"Of all the tracks to have a bad qualifying, this is probably the one, or one of the ones, you’d choose to do it, so I see no reason why we can’t fight back on Sunday. We’ll see what we can do tomorrow. But (we’ll) work hard, (I’ll) try and improve my driving, try and work with the team to see what we can do and come back stronger.”

It will be fascinating to see how Russell bounces back ahead of the first Sprint Shootout on Saturday and get his weekend back on track. He needs to have a cleaner weekend after he retired from the Australian Grand Prix last time out.