As Motorsport.com reports, George Russell is bleeding ground to Max Verstappen in the fight to be vice-champion, dropping a staggering 90 points across five grands prix. It is a wild collapse in form for the Mercedes driver, who has managed a paltry 26 points while Red Bull Racing's Max Verstappen hauled in 116 over the same brutal stretch.
That disastrous streak has blown the battle for second wide open. With three rounds left on the calendar—assuming the Qatar and Abu Dhabi grands prix go ahead as scheduled—there are no fewer than five drivers scrapping for the runner-up spot. Max Verstappen sits on 279 points, followed by George Russell on 262, Lewis Hamilton on 261, Charles Leclerc on 249, and Lando Norris on 246. This frantic chase comes in the wake of Andrea Kimi Antonelli clinching his maiden Formula 1 world title in Mexico.
We absolutely want him to score the maximum and hopefully finish second, and we need to think about what we're going to do about it, but it could be a possibility that we're giving it all the force,
Russell's run has been nothing short of a nightmare. The Briton suffered a power unit failure in Malaysia, took an engine penalty and binned it out of the sprint in Singapore, put in a bafflingly poor performance in Austin, fought a deployment issue in Mexico, and then spun right at the pit exit while running strongly in Sao Paulo.
Mercedes just wrapped up the constructors' championship at Interlagos—marking the team's ninth constructors' crown and its second with Russell, who scored three points toward the 2020 title standing in for Lewis Hamilton at the Sakhir Grand Prix. Yet attention is now turning to how the Silver Arrows can rescue their driver's season.
Team principal Toto Wolff admitted that Mercedes is considering throwing “all the force” behind Russell to secure a 1-2 finish in the drivers' standings. “We absolutely want him to score the maximum and hopefully finish second, and we need to think about what we're going to do about it, but it could be a possibility that we're giving it all the force,” Wolff commented after the Brazilian Grand Prix, noting he had not yet thought about the standings before then.
Wolff remains confident that the machine will bounce back, pointing to Russell's blistering pace in the wet qualifying at Interlagos where a final lap denied him pole position. “We're going to, like I said, go full blast, and he will recover, I have no doubt about that for next year,” Wolff said. “All the very best sportspeople have gone through difficult periods, and that's going to be part of his continued development.”
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