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Lewis Hamilton has absolutely dominated George Russell in the last couple of races as the latter has looked clueless against his Mercedes teammate. In the 2023 F1 United States GP in Austin, Hamilton was in a league of his own while Russell was struggling to even keep up.
Hamilton finished the 2023 F1 US GP in P2 (although he was disqualified later) while Russell was in the region of half a second slower than him during the race. That's a whopping margin for a driver who is expected to take over at Mercedes.
It is a bit of a surprise as well because Russell was just splendid in Qatar the race before Austin and then all of a sudden he's lost so much performance to Hamilton? What happened?
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Well, there might be an explanation to it, and it follows an eerily similar pattern to something that happened earlier in the season as well. Mercedes introduced its second major upgrade in Austin and since then the gulf between the two drivers has been astounding.
What this also does is that it brings to the forefront an interesting pattern in the season of the two drivers whenever an upgrade is introduced on the car. Let's take a look.
Lewis Hamilton vs George Russell: The curious trend post-Mercedes upgrades
The two Mercedes drivers have had a contrasting season in 2023 as we've seen Lewis Hamilton soar to third in the championship standings, George Russell has struggled with only a single podium to his name. There is, however, an interesting pattern that has emerged in the performances of the two drivers.
Let's take a look at the pattern of their performances this season. To do that, we used our driver ratings as a metric because it will encompass both qualifying as well as race performance over a Grand Prix weekend with a singular empirical value.
Now if we notice carefully, there is a certain dip in ratings for George Russell and a jump for Lewis Hamilton post-Monaco and post-Austin. These two races are significant because, in both of these events, Mercedes introduced its two major upgrades this season.
To have a better understanding of the pattern that seems to have emerged this season in the relative performances of the two drivers, we've divided the season into 4 parts.
- Pre-Monaco(first upgrade)
- Monaco-summer(post first upgrade)
- Post summer break-Pre-Austin(Second upgrade)
- Austin-now(post second upgrade)
Before Monaco, Mercedes ran its original car, and the major upgrades including the sidepods were introduced. We've taken the post-summer break as a different phase because George Russell had some time to understand the car and come back stronger post-summer break.
If we take a look at the average driver ratings for both of these drivers in these four phases, it paints an interesting picture. Let's take a look.
So what we can see here is that the upgrades introduced by Mercedes are having a major impact on the performance of the two drivers. Every time a major upgrade has been introduced, George Russell seems to have seen his performances go down while Lewis Hamilton has had the exact opposite effect.
It becomes very visible when you look at the average driver ratings in these phases as Russell drops from 8.3 to 6.6 when the Monaco upgrade was introduced and something similar has happened with the introduction of the Austin upgrade.
Possible theory of why it is happening
Now there are two theories at play here that might explain why this has happened.
- Mercedes is building cars favoring Hamilton's driving style
- George is not as adaptive to changes to the car unlike Lewis
Let's take a look at both of these cases.
Mercedes is building cars favoring Hamilton's driving style
There is a possibility that Mercedes makes changes to its cars that are more in line with Lewis Hamilton's driving style. Since Hamilton is the lead driver and has been so for close to a decade now, the aim tends to be to provide him with the best possible package. When that happens, it makes it easier for Hamilton to be fast in that car from the very first lap.
Since the car characteristics are natural to him, it makes it easier for him to adapt and just get on with the business while George Russell takes time to adapt to the changes made to the car. If they're not natural to his driving style, he needs time to get used to the car before producing the best possible result.
George Russell is not as adaptive to changes to the car unlike Lewis Hamilton
The second plausible explanation here is the possibility that Lewis Hamilton may be a more adaptive driver than George Russell. Mercedes is making drastic changes to the car and trying to align it more towards the Red Bull concept. While the lead driver has been able to adapt to these changes from the get-go, Russell has found it hard.
This has also been evident in both the Monaco and Austin upgrade introductions. In terms of getting on the pace as soon as the upgrades as brought has not happened with George in either of those two scenarios and it is quite visible at the moment
Is it a bad sign for George Russell?
On the face of it, yes, it's a bad sign because first of all if Mercedes is building a car keeping Lewis Hamilton's driving style in mind then that hurts George Russell if the car is capable of potentially challenging for the title. Every time new modifications would be made to the car, and while Russell would struggle to adapt, Hamilton would just zoom ahead in the championship standings.
On the other side, even if Mercedes is not trying to favor one driver over the other every time the team develops the car, George Russell has shown a lack of adaptation as compared to Hamilton.
Overall, it does show that maybe Mercedes either needs to start building a car with input from both drivers or just favor Lewis Hamilton in a potential title battle because George Russell is already compromised.
This also shows that maybe the gap between the two Mercedes drivers is simply not a product of one driver finding form over the other. There are granular details at play here that do tend to get missed out often.
