George Russell hopes he can salvage a top-six finish starting from the back of the grid in Sunday’s Singapore Grand Prix.
The Mercedes driver has to start from the rear of the grid after exceeding his maximum allocation of power unit components this weekend. His latest engine change was triggered by the failure which put him out of last week’s race in Malaysia.“It’s going to be challenging, for sure,” said Russell. “When you look at Kimi [Antonelli] he started 19th in Monza and won, and then in Baku he was in 16th and got up to P10 with about 15 laps remaining. So same driver, similar track and two very different circumstances.
“So I hope I can get into the points, I hope I can [reach] P7, P6 depending on whether Hadjar’s got a penalty or not.”
Russell is running Mercedes’ older aerodynamic specification this weekend as the team investigates the differences between it and the new components it introduced to mixed results a week ago.
He crashed while leading the sprint race in Singapore and said his car hasn’t felt the same since. Russell said he completed several laps in qualifying “mainly just to make sure the car was feeling as it did yesterday after the crash this morning, but it didn’t quite feel the same in all honesty.”
“I had great pace yesterday, we were in the top three almost every lap that I competed. Today I wasn’t even in the top five at any point throughout the session. So I need to try and understand why that was.”
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