Wolff explains why Russell's 10-place Singapore climb still fell short of Mercedes' target

George Russell climbed ten places from 19th to ninth at the Singapore Grand Prix, but Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has explained why the recovery drive at Marina Bay still fell short of what the team had hoped for.

Wolff pointed to the aerodynamic conditions unique to the Singapore street circuit as the primary obstacle. Once Russell closed on the cars ahead, the turbulent wake robbed his W16 of downforce and made overtaking effectively impossible, despite the Briton carrying a significant pace advantage over the traffic in front of him.

“I think it’s so difficult here to overtake,” Wolff said. “The moment you catch the car in front, you have such a wake, so much dirty air that you lose downforce, and I think at that stage he was probably one and a half seconds faster than the guys in front of him, but you can’t pass. So our best case scenario was P7. If it would have gone smoothly, I think P9 — we need to be happy with that. It was a damage limitation race for us with him starting from the back.”

Wolff added, with characteristic dry wit, that the charge through the field at least “gave them good TV coverage, no?”

Russell himself was measured in his assessment. “First stint made good progress. Second stint, Nico [Hülkenberg] did a good job defending. Pretty much challenging, but yeah, not much more to say,” he said.

A virtual safety car period briefly offered Russell a chance to gain further ground via a free pit stop, but the window closed just as he reached the pit entry, denying him the benefit. “Yeah, I mean 10 seconds more — five, 10, 20 seconds more — it would have helped the picture, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over that,” Russell said. “I think the main thing for us as a team is to try and understand how we’re going to find more performance, because the performance of Red Bull has been very impressive the last three weeks on three very different circuits.”

Russell’s difficult weekend began before Sunday’s race. A power unit failure that forced him out of the Malaysian Grand Prix triggered a 60-place grid penalty after Mercedes replaced multiple power unit components, along with the Energy Store and Control Electronics Unit. With Fernando Alonso, Lance Stroll, and Isack Hadjar starting from the pit lane, Russell lined up 19th on the Marina Bay grid.