Mercedes suffer ‘slowest Friday’ in Monaco but Russell optimistic two-stop race offers ‘a chance’ George Russell believes that Mercedes endured “our slowest Friday” of the season ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix, but that the mandated two-stop race means there “may be a bit of a chance”.
The Briton finished sixth and 12th after the two one-hour sessions on the streets of Monte Carlo having never troubled the top of the leaderboard. Russell comes to Monaco having finished outside the top-five for the first time this season in a Grand Prix last time out at Imola, describing the event as the ‘worst day’ in years for Mercedes.
After Friday running at Monaco, Russell felt the team were still lacking performance but still had hope for both Qualifying and the race.”To be honest in terms of pure performance, it’s probably been our slowest Friday,” he said.
“But to be honest, we had a bad Friday here last year and we were only, I think, a tenth from pole in the end. So kind of all still to play for and I’m still pretty excited to see how Sunday is going to pan out. “Even if we’re not in the top five, or top three, tomorrow I still think there may be a bit of a chance on Sunday, especially the first time being as it is this year [with the two-stop rule]. We’ll keep our hopes alive.” Russell admitted that teams using up hard sets of tyres “was a bit of a surprise to us” and that different strategies will be at play come the race.
He added: “It’s always amazing driving around here, we weren’t very quick today but tomorrow usually is the main day. But, this weekend, with the mandated two-stop, it will be interesting.” Team mate Kimi Antonelli finished his first day in F1 machinery on the streets of the Principality in ninth, having taken 11th in the earlier session.
Having kept the car out of the barriers, the Italian rookie admitted that building up and finding the maximum performance of the tyres had been the goal.”It’s tricky, definitely, to find the right balance and strike the maximum out of the tyre,” he said.
“I think today we’ve been trying a lot of different things, especially with the soft [tyre], especially in terms of warm-up because it’s really hard to extract the grip, especially on lap one. But overall I think learned a lot during the day and looking forward to tomorrow.”
