Russell sees F1 top four being closely matched based on early 2026 running

George Russell says the top four teams of Mercedes, McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari all look closely matched from the initial running of 2026 Formula 1 cars in Barcelona, while he also is not discounting Aston Martin’s potential.

The new regulations for this season offer the opportunity for one team to gain a clear advantage through a combination of power unit and aerodynamic performance, with the Mercedes engine expected to be strong. After Mercedes completed the highest mileage of the Barcelona shakedown and topped the times on its final two days of running, Russell has been installed as the early championship favorite with bookmakers, and he’s eyeing up a title fight with multiple drivers at this stage.

“I'd love for it to turn out that way, and I do want to go head-to-head with Max [Verstappen], and obviously Lando [Norris] had a great season last year,” Russell said. “But no, it [the early odds] didn't add any more pressure.

“I think probably the fans and people were expecting it to potentially be Mercedes vs McLaren, because there was a lot of anticipation that Mercedes would clearly have the best power unit. But it seems like the other power unit manufacturers have done a good job, and we know that Red Bull have always had an amazing car – even through the years of dominance of Mercedes, it was their engine that was letting them down, not their car. And we obviously know how good Max is. So, I think he's very much going to be in the fight this year, and that is great.

“You obviously wish that you'd have a slightly easier time of it, but it should never be easy. And if you're going to win, you want to have fought for it, and won it fair and square on track.

“I think the best-case scenario for the sport and also for the drivers is that you've got a number of different drivers and a number of different teams all battling it out. And I think at the moment it does look like Red Bull, McLaren, Ferrari and ourselves are, let's say, the four teams are all quite close within one another.

“But you can't discount what you've seen from Aston Martin, and what Adrian [Newey] has done with that car. It looks pretty spectacular. And Honda over the past few years with Red Bull have had a very good engine beneath them. So we also know what they're capable of.

“So that would be awesome to see a big fight. And I remember it was 2012 or 2010, I think it was, when you had the McLarens, Fernando [Alonso] and the Red Bulls all fighting. That's what the sport is about and that's what we hope it will be about this year.”

Although Russell is downplaying how strong the Mercedes performance level could be, he says the running in Barcelona at least showed there to be no unexpected surprises from the W17.

“Obviously, we've only driven the car for three days and it's still very early days, but quoting Toto [Wolff, team principal], it doesn't look like it's a turd, which is a bonus! And to be honest, in the early days like this, you know when it could be a really bad car and you can sort of highlight those negatives early on – and we don't believe it is.

“But is it a car that can produce a world championship? It's still way too early to see. We've been quite surprised by what we've seen from some of our rivals, especially sort of on the Red Bull power unit side – that looks very impressive considering they're a completely new outfit and reliable as well. So kudos to them.

“We've had a very reliable test, but we'll have to wait and see if the car lives up to the expectation. Because as confident as we were that there weren't going to be any crazy unknowns or unforeseen things happening with the car, like we saw with porpoising, we still didn't know. Nobody expected porpoising in 2022. So you couldn't discount anything right now.

“But that's why I think we left Barcelona with a positive feeling, because the car reacted as we anticipated. The numbers we're seeing from the aero on the car match what we see back on the simulator. How the car is handling is matching how it feels on the simulator. So this is something we've not really experienced since 2021 as a team.

“So we're sort of ticking the boxes of everything that we want to tick but we can't discount our rivals, because as I said, there was a lot of talk around the Red Bull power unit not being up to standard [in] year one. From what we've seen so far, they've definitely delivered.

“The Ferrari power unit looks reliable. They did lots of laps not far behind us over the course of the test. And from a power unit side, Haas did loads of laps as well with the Ferrari engine. So the truth is that there could be a good fight on our hands, but we're satisfied with what we've experienced so far.”