George Russell cannot afford paranoia as Kimi Antonelli sets a new standard

But there is a nagging question. How do you explain the fact that a 19-year-old has won five races in a row, and finished second in the other one, while his vastly more experienced team-mate, who trounced him last year, is now third in a two-horse race, 68 points behind him?

What on earth is Kimi doing right that George Russell is doing wrong? Is it driving styles? Car set-up? Luck? Is there something darker at play?

Well, the first thing to say is that George needs to wipe that last thought from his mind. There will be a lot of people telling him that Mercedes are out to nobble him, that Kimi is Toto Wolff’s protege, that they want the Italian to win. Social media will be abuzz with conspiracy theories. George shouldn’t listen to any of that as therein lies the road to madness.

It does happen to a lot of drivers when one team-mate starts to outperform the other. They can start to get paranoid, look for excuses. When I was Rubens Barrichello’s race engineer at Jordan, there was a brief period when he felt the team were favouring Eddie Irvine. Eddie Jordan was obviously Irish, I was Irish, Irvine was Irish…

Fortunately Rubens and I had a great relationship. We were able to have a beer together, talk about family, connect on a human level, which is what you need with a driver. The only thing EJ might have preferred about Eddie was the fact he was a character whereas Rubens was very serious. But the team never actively favoured him. Luckily the paranoia only lasted briefly.

More seriously, at the 1997 Argentine Grand Prix, after Giancarlo Fisichella and Ralf Schumacher had their famous ding-dong which ruined a near-certain double podium, possibly even a win, Fisi started to keep things back with his engineer. Once you start doing that, everything spirals. The trust goes.

George is nowhere near that. And he needs to stick to facts not fantasy. Over the last two races he has lost a probable 40 points through no fault of his own. He has been very unlucky. But by any objective assessment, Mercedes weren’t out to get him. In Montreal his power unit conked out when he was leading. That is the last thing Mercedes would have wanted to happen publicly. They want to win the constructors’ title.

In Monaco, George had a poor qualifying for which he must take responsibility. Then he missed out on a podium through no fault of his own after his team failed to observe a five-second penalty correctly and he copped a drive-through penalty. Again, there is no reason to suppose they would have done this deliberately. The team didn’t need to help Kimi. He was already on course to win the race.

George just needs to keep his head down. I didn’t like hearing him talk about Kimi doing a better job of getting his tyres into the right operating window after qualifying on Saturday. That to me sounded like looking for excuses.

George is a very quick driver and I don’t think he is doing a lot wrong. If there is a difference between them it is probably that George got used to driving the ground-effect cars for four years. They were difficult cars to drive, you had to use a very stiff suspension set-up. Kimi was new to them last year and it showed.

This year, you can run the cars softer, and in Monaco particularly that is very helpful with all the bumps, the different cambers, the kerbs.

From Friday to Saturday in Monaco, Mercedes clearly made a big step. They reported this was due to running the suspension softer. Kimi clearly adapted better. Riding a wave of confidence, his qualifying lap was sensational, maximum attack and millimetre perfect. Perhaps in George’s mind he was a little more reticent to take on the kerbs given he would have been slung across the track into the barriers last year?

At some point, you just have to accept that Kimi is just pretty good. There is an old saying “Every day is a school day”. Kimi appears to be a sponge, taking things on fast.

And he has a wise old owl behind him. His engineer, Peter Bonnington, who ran Lewis Hamilton for many years, is very experienced and the combination clearly works well. It’s not that Bono is a rocket scientist but he can bring his many years of experience to bear, suggesting set-up tweaks, tricks. Kimi is young, not stuck in his ways, open-minded enough to adapt.

He is also the perfect modern-day driver in many respects. He is small, light. That’s less of an advantage than it used to be with the minimum weight limit and cockpit sizes. But there could be small differences there – more airflow around the airbox, more room in the cockpit, more cooling. That’s not a negative for George, just all positives for Kimi.

I also think the wheel-to-wheel battles they had in Canada may have cemented in Kimi and Bono’s minds that the best way to beat George is to out-qualify him. I don’t mean setting the car up specifically for one-lap pace, but maybe just holding a little bit back in the debrief meetings. Things like knowing you can hit a certain kerb that little bit harder on your last lap, when the car is at its lightest and grip level at its best. Keeping that to yourself is normal stuff.

As I said, George just needs to keep his head down. He is a very talented driver. There are still at least 16 races left, possibly more. He cannot afford to let the paranoia creep in. It will be hard enough catching Kimi as it is.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]