GEORGE RUSSELL
“It’s just getting [to be] a joke at the moment. I’ve never been so inconsistent in my life. You look at the lap charts and you’d think I’m a bloody rookie or whatever. I felt like I was driving very similar lap after lap and it was like a yo-yo. I felt like an idiot. We need to seriously pull our fingers out.”
THE MOST REMARKABLE thing about George Russell’s stark words to Williams during a debrief at the 2019 British Grand Prix – immortalised in the ninth episode of the second series of Netflix’s Drive to Survive – is that, in Formula 1 terms at least, he was a rookie. The 2018 Formula 2 champion was just 10 races into his F1 career when that scene took place. After 11 more, he finished his first season in grand prix racing last in the championship, the only driver not to score, with team-mate Robert Kubica ahead thanks to his 10th place in Germany. But the results only provide a snapshot of the campaign, which was Williams’s nadir as it remained last in the constructors’ championship but lost six points compared to its seven from 2018. The FW42 missed the start of testing, which led to a stunningly awkward moment between deputy team principal Claire Williams and former chief technical officer Paddy Lowe in the same Drive to Survive episode that focused on the squad.
For Russell, things were better than they appeared on paper. He beat Kubica in qualifying at all 21 events, and only finished two races behind the Pole – including crucially at Hockenheim as the disqualification of the Alfa Romeos gave
