Here's the thing: when a teammate starts running away with a championship, the garage usually turns into a warzone. But George Russell insists that hasn't been the case alongside Kimi Antonelli this year. Heading into the Mexico City Grand Prix—where Antonelli can secure his maiden title by finishing ninth or higher—Russell has opened up about how they manage their contrasting campaigns.
That stunning start to 2026 put Mercedes right at the front, but it was the Italian who seized the advantage in the drivers' standings. Russell has been completely candid about the reality of the situation. As he put it, Antonelli has simply "been at a higher level than me this year". Because of that gap, they haven't found themselves battling wheel-to-wheel all that often, keeping on-track friction to a minimum. When it's time to work, they stick to their individual engineers and keep to themselves.
It has been a wild, roller-coaster sort of year for the Briton. On one hand, you have drives like Baku, where he took pole position by eight-tenths and fended off Max Verstappen to take the win in the W17. But that brilliant machine performance has been brutally undercut by a retirement, a ninth place, and an eighth place over three rounds. Russell admitted he has never experienced a season with such wild fluctuations in performance throughout his career. The speed is undeniably there, but the hit rate isn't, and figuring out why remains the main priority.
Looking ahead to 2027, with both drivers set to stay put, Russell isn't wasting energy plotting a direct attack on his garage neighbor. Having worked with a sports psychologist for seven years through his most successful spells in Formula 1, his mindset is entirely internal. Comparing racing to golf rather than boxing, he views a qualifying lap as a solitary test of preparation. Instead of obsessing over how to beat his number one competitor, he is staring in the mirror, searching for the exact feelings from the car and himself that unlocked those rare, brilliant weekends so he can finally lock down some much-needed consistency.
