Bump sends Russell’s Monaco weekend ‘up in smoke’

George Russell says a bump caused his car to have a reliability issue in qualifying for the Monaco Grand Prix that has left his weekend “up in smoke.”

Mercedes endured a nightmare qualifying session as Kimi Antonelli crashed at the end of Q1 and was not able to take part in Q2, leaving him 15th on the grid. With the Italian already out, Russell then lost power on his first timed lap of Q2 and stopped in the tunnel, eliminating him in 14th place when he felt he was in the mix at the front of the field.

“Yeah [the bump] was definitely the cause but it was a bump on the straight,” Russell said. “It’s a bump that has been there all weekend, and a bump that I’ve felt it all weekend, but for whatever reason on this occasion the whole engine switched off when I hit this bump.

“Really disappointing because we got ourselves a bit lost this weekend with the set-up and went back to basics for qualifying, and from lap one I felt back in the game. Kimi stayed with probably more the setup he had in FP3; I went back to something that we knew. He was struggling and we were there – I feel we would have been in the top four today, and now we’re not.

“It was clicking in Q1 and we were one of the few drivers not to take any new tires. I did one corner in Q2 and I was already almost two tenths up and already that would have been plenty enough to be into Q3 with two sets. We had the two hard tires, we had a real chance this weekend, but now it’s up in smoke and weekend over, so it’s pretty deflating.”

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The new mandatory two-stop regulation for Monaco opens up the potential for out of position cars to move forward in the race, but Russell says Mercedes is too far back to fight for the podium and biggest points.

“For sure there’s going to be some crazy strategies, but we qualified 14th – we probably should have been in the top five, so there’s 10 cars between me and where we should have been," he said. "If people are doing crazy things with the strategy, half of those guys will go one way, the other half will go the other way, therefore whichever one we decide we’re still stuck behind five drivers.

“You’re going to see one of two things – people pitting on lap one, or people going really long into the race. We do have a small advantage with the two hard tires, but if we can’t pass there’s not much we can do.”