"It's a very flattering result": George Russell's honest assessment of a disappointing 2023 F1 Miami GP qualifying for Mercedes

Mercedes driver George Russell has said that starting P6 for the 2023 F1 Miami GP is a very flattering result for him and the team as they simply did not have the pace this weekend.

After topping the FP1 session, Russell, as well as teammate Lewis Hamilton, struggled to extract the maximum performance from the car. Surprisingly, they were slower than Ferrari and Aston Martin during their long-run in FP2.

In qualifying, both drivers had to fight to get out of Q1. While Hamilton failed to get out of Q2, George Russell marginally got in Q3.

Speaking to Sky Sports, Russell said:

"I wouldn't necessarily say quite pleased, of course, I'll take the result, it's a very flattering result for the performance that we showed. I did a really decent lap in Q2 to just scrape through, just to get into Q3 and that's not where we should be."

"Everybody is working so, so hard to bring more performance to the car, it's definitely not for a lack of effort and it's just not coming to us at the moment. Lots to think about, a few questions that need answering, tomorrow is a new day and we'll see what we can do."

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"I hope so, it's a theme of us that we generally have a better Sunday than Saturday" - George Russell

George Russell was optimistic that the team might have a better race than qualifying and he could make up places and get higher than sixth on Sunday.

He said:

"I hope so, it's a theme of us that we generally have a better Sunday than Saturday. Obviously got the Alpine and Haas around us, hopefully, we can get past them, Ferrari tends to struggle a bit more on Sunday. We'll focus on [Sunday], but we need to think about the bigger picture and how we're gonna bring that fight to the guys at the top."

While analyzing the team's qualifying, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff said:

"There is not a lot to say [to Lewis]. The car is simply not fast enough and putting him in a situation on his out lap where the driver isn't able to prepare their tires makes it even worse. Today [Saturday] for George and Lewis that really went south and you can see in his first sector that the car simply wasn't there."

There is still possibilities for George Russell to score some good points as he would fancy himself to get past an Alpine and Haas that are ahead of him.