George Russell has revealed the scale of the technical issues he experienced during F1 Bahrain GP.
Having far from a straightforward evening under the lights, multiple, separate technical issues blighted his W16. His transponder was the first to develop an intermittent fault. This caused the Briton to jump to different areas of the timesheets. His team later informed him his steering wheel dashboard could fail. Most notably, though, he developed a DRS fault that led to an FIA investigation.
Although he kept his second place, Russell admitted relief at making it to the chequered flag. Speaking in the post-race FIA press conference, he said the race became ‘exceptionally difficult’.
“It was exceptionally difficult towards the end. I had all sorts of problems with the car. The steering wheel, I was losing all my data and the brake pedal went into a failure mode, so I had to do all these resets.
“One minute the brakes were working properly, the next they weren’t. So I was pretty pleased when I saw the chequered flag, to be honest.
Describing the DRS moment that almost wrecked his race, Russell said he was clueless as to the cause. He stated that he believed no competitive advantage was gained.
“I don’t really know how that happened. It was something to do with all these failures we were having. As soon as I saw it opened, I backed off.
“I lost two tenths of a second. It never happened again throughout. I didn’t actually click the DRS button – I clicked another button and it opened. As I said, I lost a lot more than I gained – I don’t think I even gained anything because it was open for less than a second.“
Bahrain GP performance giving ‘a lot of confidence’ to George Russell
George Russell said that, given his technical issues, holding off Lando Norris’s charging McLaren was a satisfying conclusion to his race.
He admitted it was one of his best P2 finishes in his career.
“I’ve not actually had that many P2s to be honest. I’ve had a few P3s, but we did not expect to be anywhere close to McLaren this weekend.
“Qualifying on the front row was a real surprise. And then seeing Lando right up there on lap one behind me, I thought, “He’s going to fly off into the distance here.” Oscar did an amazing job to control the race, but to keep Lando at bay, I was really, really pleased about.”
George Russell also confirmed the result gave him a significant confidence boost, but refused to be dawn if he is now a title contender.
“A lot of confidence, to be honest. This was the real sort of test for us. We knew that our car likes the cold conditions, and the competitiveness we showed in China and Suzuka was no major surprise.
“But this was going to be the question mark – here in Bahrain. And we’ve had another strong weekend. So it bodes well for the season.
“I’d love to say so, but I don’t think we are, to be honest. McLaren are just too dominant right now. I think this is probably going to be their peak performance – what we saw this week in Bahrain.
“And what we saw in China and Suzuka is probably their worst-case scenario and they still obviously got one victory from those two races.
“ So we’ve got to keep on picking up the points, picking up the pieces. And this weekend we picked up the pieces to get a P2 – and we did it in Melbourne as well to get the P3. I don’t expect this to continue for many races to come, but who knows.“
