"We're in that transitional process at the moment" - George Russell claims Mercedes is 'a few more races' away from fighting with Red Bull and Ferrari

George Russell is optimistic about what the future holds for Mercedes. After an improved performance in Barcelona, where the German team demonstrated impressive race pace, there were suggestions that the team was back in form. However, Russell feels that the team is still in a transition phase where it is starting to learn more about the car.

According to the Mercedes driver, since the team has found the direction in which it needs to make improvements, it will take a few races to draw level with Red Bull and Ferrari and compete for wins.

He said:

“Hopefully it would be faster. But I think I don’t think it’s necessarily much faster at the moment but it’s given us a direction where we think we can get a lot more out of it, whereas the car we had in Bahrain, that was sort of its maximum potential, and we couldn’t really improve it from there on in. Sometimes you got to take a small step back to take three steps forward.”

He continued:

“And I think we’re in that transitional process at the moment. And I think it’ll be a few more races before we started to see us hopefully fighting with the Ferrari and Red Bull.”

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George Russell: Having Lewis Hamilton as a teammate is very inspiring to watch

George Russell's start to life at Mercedes has been quite remarkable. The Mercedes driver has kept his nose clean, scoring a top-five result every time and to add to it, has had the measure of his teammate Lewis Hamilton. When questioned about his views on how the season has panned out, George Russell said that the biggest highlight has been working alongside Lewis Hamilton.

He said:

“Yeah, I think it’s been not a bad start to the season, personally. I think there’s definitely room to improve in certain areas. And I think, obviously, I’m in a really privileged position, being teammates with Lewis [Hamilton] and learning so much from him, how he works, how he goes about his business with his engineers, how he gets the whole team motivated. It’s quite inspiring to see.”

He added:

“Also, on the technical side he’s pretty impressive, which a lot of people probably wouldn’t really recognise or appreciate. So, yeah, definitely room to improve. But I think in terms of results, it’s been fine. And yeah, I don’t think we could have probably achieved much higher results when I look at the season rationally. I think probably other than Bahrain, we probably finished as high as we could in every single race.”

George Russell is on a six-race winning streak over Lewis Hamilton and it will be interesting to see if he can stretch it further in Baku or if Lewis Hamilton fights back once again.