Russell knows where qualifying went wrong: 'I made one mistake'

For the third time this season, George Russell failed to qualify his Mercedes in the top five. Only in Bahrain he finished third. After twice finishing seventh and thus ninth in Japan, it is time for the Briton to find out why. Where it lies today, Russell knows very well.

"I was on a really strong lap, two and a half tenths up by turn eleven and expecting to maybe finish four tenths ahead. I made one small mistake and lost all the time. That was a bit of a shame, but we know the strengths and weaknesses of our car," Russell said after qualifying.

So the team knows the car's strengths, but mostly weaknesses. So where does it go wrong? "The weakness is the high-speed corners. When you get to qualifying, you take the fuel out, and the corners are becoming faster and faster and faster, so the pace naturally goes away from us a bit in those corners," said the one-time race winner. He continued: "Unfortunately, just with the nature of this calendar, we've had three circuits in a row that are all high-speed. If we started the season in Bahrain, Baku and Singapore, we'd probably be talking a very different picture for us."

Moderate season start Mercedes

George Russell is having a mediocre start to the season both individually and with his team. The team has just 26 points after three race weekends. And both cars failed to finish in the points in Australia. Russell even got into another bizarre accident, which prevented him from finishing the race at all. For that incident on the other hand, Fernando Alonso did receive a 20-second time penalty.