Mercedes working on deeper cause behind George Russell's recurring power issue

The Belgian Grand Prix weekend highlighted the contrasting fortunes inside the Mercedes garage. Kimi Antonelli delivered a commanding performance, defeating Charles Leclerc to claim victory on Sunday after a tense battle. On the other side of the garage, Russell's race ended on the opening lap following contact with Lewis Hamilton at Turn 5.

However, Russell's biggest concern went far beyond his early DNF. Throughout the entire weekend, he repeatedly complained about a lack of power on the straights, exactly the same issue that had compromised his performance at Silverstone just two weeks earlier.

The half-second gap between Antonelli and Russell in the Belgian Grand Prix qualifying accurately reflected the current form of the two Mercedes title contenders.

Antonelli has been extracting exceptional performance from the car despite difficult weekends in Barcelona and Silverstone. Russell, meanwhile, has consistently struggled with straight-line speed in both qualifying and the race.

Mercedes is not the only team experiencing such a discrepancy between its drivers. McLaren is facing a very similar situation.

Despite lacking a car capable of consistently fighting for pole positions and victories, the performance gap between Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri has become increasingly noticeable. The reigning world champion is still in front in the Drivers' Standings by 11 points despite suffering more reliability issues throughout the season.

McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella offered an explanation after Saturday qualifying at Spa-Francorchamps.

According to the Italian team boss, one of the biggest differentiating factors is how effectively drivers allow the power unit to manage its electrical energy deployment. This becomes especially important at power-sensitive circuits such as Spa, where the available electrical energy is insufficient to provide maximum deployment throughout an entire lap, making battery harvesting and recharge strategy critical.

He continued: "The problem is that the power unit is learning whilst the drivers are driving, and if you did the first Q3 that in a different way than the second one, or the other driver, then you have already the disadvantage. When we try and analyze the reasons why we have these differences in terms of power unit behavior, and in this case, these differences are mainly related to the electrical deployment. They don't have to do with the operation of the internal combustion also, but it's kind of less visible. When we try to analyze this, it gets immediately quite complicated."

"At the same time you need to be able to anticipate and make sure that the operation of the power unit unfolds as expected. Because this is not only for the influence it has in the power limited sections in the straights, but also because it affects the braking points. Because if you have an additional amount of harvest with a super clip before braking, then you are approaching the braking 10 kph slower and your braking point changes. So, this is quite difficult to master, I would say, for the drivers, and it's one of the reasons why I'm sure the drivers as well talk about the difficulties from a driving point of view," concluded the Italian engineer.

What Stella explained, although technically correct, does not offer a complete explanation of the issues highlighted by Russell in the last two races.

In a video recently published on their social channels, Mercedes’ Simone Resta explained how, after Silverstone, Russell changed his driving style to solve this issue and, although the scenario has improved, it hasn't been fully resolved yet.

This could suggest a problem that is much more difficult to understand even for the engineers, perhaps linked to the energy deployment software, which could take some time to be fully resolved.

"Then we thought it was my driving style, the throttle, and I convinced myself that it was something in my driving. Now we're very confident it's not the driving style and that there's a serious issue at play here. The team are working so hard to resolve it, but every lap I do when I see I'm down anywhere from two tenths to six tenths on the straights, it's pretty infuriating," the Briton added.

Russell's situation was made even worse by another issue that affected Mercedes-powered cars after the start at Spa.

In terms of the issue at the start of the Belgian GP, Mercedes has already found a solution, the team confirmed to GPblog. The German outfit expects that a similar problem will not occur during next weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix.