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Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has admitted he's happy to have two fast drivers within the team who are pushing each other forward. Speaking to Sky Sports after George Russell won the race in Brazil, Wolff was questioned over potential tensions between his two drivers as they start competing for top positions.
Shrugging off worries on that front, the Austrian said that he was happy to have two strong drivers within the team. He said:
"They are both alpha drivers and this is good. We don't want a puppy in the car. We manage that as well as we can."
Lewis Hamilton also had a lot of praise for his Mercedes teammate as he credited Russell's impressive debut season to the fact that he's been a part of the team for some time already. He said:
"I've seen what he did at Williams. I think naturally you have to say it's impressive what he's done this year, the consistency he's had, how he's arrived and just hit the ground running. It's not like he arrived in a completely brand new team. The previous couple of years he was sitting right behind me watching the work that I was doing with the engineers, with Ricky (who), who is now his number one."
Hamilton added:
"It's been super easy to blend in. He uses my steering wheel, and he's obviously got to do the test days prior to the year, so I think he's just blended in perfectly and he's been a positive force in the team. He's helped keep the equilibrium in the team, in terms of the working relationship I think it's strong."
First-year at Mercedes made George Russell feel like a rookie
Speaking about his first year within the Brackley-based outfit, George Russell admitted that he did feel a bit like a rookie because the level at which Mercedes operates is very high. He said:
"In some ways I've felt like a bit of a rookie this year because the level at which this team operates on is a level that I've never experienced before, and I'm talking about things that I'd never even heard of in F1 before. That took me some time to learn and understand how to get the most out of the team, out of the car."
He added:
"The capability within this team is huge and the potential is huge, and learning to use all the resources at our disposal to bring more performance, is a lot more than I've ever been used to and it took me a little bit of a while to wrap my head around that."
Mercedes is riding on an upward trajectory at the moment and the win in Brazil was one of the standout things to have happened this season for the German squad.
