“Let’s see what Mr Russell can do” – Helmut Marko skeptical of incoming Mercedes F1 driver's race pace

Red Bull special advisor Helmut Marko has cast doubt on George Russell’s race pace. The British driver is set to race for Mercedes alongside Lewis Hamilton in 2022.

In an interview with AutoRevue, Marko said:

“Let's see what Mr Russell will do at Mercedes and whether the praise he has received in advance is justified. I want to see that first. There's no discussion in qualifying, he's sensational there but if you look at his race speed, he wasn't far ahead of (Nicholas) Latifi."

Marko was referring to Russell’s phenomenal qualifying performances at Williams last season. Despite Williams being one of the slower cars on the grid, the Brit always managed to extract stellar qualifying performances to regularly appear in Q2.

On rare occasions, such as the wet qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa, he even beat his future teammate Hamilton to take P2 and was only bested by Max Verstappen in a Red Bull.

Nevertheless, Russell’s pace come race day has not been stellar, at least compared to his supreme qualifying performances. Often, he has failed to make use of his good qualifying positions.

A notable example would be the Russian Grand Prix: while he qualified in the top 3 once again, he struggled on race day to hold off faster cars behind him, while his inferior Williams ate through its tires. After pitting for fresh tires too early, Russell couldn’t recover enough to even finish among the points.

Russell’s poor race pace at Williams is not a good indicator of potential performances at Mercedes

While Russell’s race day performances haven’t been good at Williams, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll struggle at Mercedes as well. The Brit’s performances with Williams had more to do with the car than himself.

The Williams FW43B is effectively based on the team’s FW42 from 2019 – which was a terribly slow car in itself— and has seen very little development over the last two years.

The reason Russell was able to extract more out of the car during qualifying to outpace faster cars while struggling to be any faster than his own teammate was simply due to the nature of modern F1 cars.

In qualifying, drivers have nearly unlimited leeway to push the car and drive it the way they want. In comparison, the cars need to be managed and coaxed to last the entire duration of the Grand Prix, and therefore drivers have a limited working window in which to operate.

In the case of Williams, that operating window is extremely thin: while it may be capable of competing with a few faster cars, it does so with other compromises such as tire wear, fuel consumption, and more.

Interestingly, during the second half of the 2021 season, when Red Bull was second-best compared to Mercedes, Verstappen put in stellar qualifying performances but struggled to match Hamilton’s pace come race day.