George Russell is not happy
Arrived at Suzuka with the braids of the great favourite, for the second consecutive qualification George Russell he is forced to chew bitterness. And if in China a clear technical problem had prevented him from fighting with his (by this point increasingly cumbersome) teammate Andrea Kimi Antonellionce again according to the English driver something happened that took him off the right direction. Not, therefore, a real failure like in Shanghai, but still an error in the set-up changes that made him lose the right confidence at the wheel of his very fast Mercedes, relegating him to second place on the starting grid, three tenths from pole position.
The problem that affected the qualification
“It was really strange, to be honest – explains George Russell in the press conference – because we made a change to the set-up just before qualifying and the car no longer looked the same compared to how it had performed all weekend. You saw my first laps in Q1 when I ended up in seventh or eighth place, and then we had to adapt by substantially changing the incidence of the front wing during qualifying (a change to the structure also permitted under parc fermé regime, ed). The team is already taking a look to understand more, but at the moment we don’t know if we did something wrong or what else happened. But, in a certain sense, I’m happy to be in this position because after Q1 I didn’t know how qualifying would end”.
The World Championship leader then explained how he felt in difficulty on the track: “There was something problematic about the rear, which showed up especially in the snake. I couldn’t attack any of the corners, the rear end skidded the whole timebut there’s really nothing we can do right now. It’s a good starting position for tomorrow, and the race will be long. Of course it’s not ideal because I had felt comfortable with the car all weekend while in qualifying something seemed to have broken. So we’ll see, maybe we’ll get some answers from the data analysis, maybe I can adapt my riding style to compensate, but it definitely wasn’t the session we would have liked. For two weeks straight I experienced somewhat complicated qualifying…”.
Watch out for McLaren and Ferrari
“To be honest, qualifying was very close between the Ferraris and McLarens, and that was probably a bit of a surprise for us. We both had a very good FP3 session and thought we had a bit more of an edge over our rivals. Obviously we’re still in first and second place, so that’s great, but it’s clear that the others are catching up”, concluded George Russell after qualifying for the 2026 Formula 1 Japanese GP.
