George Russell explains why he might already be a multiple world champion if he had driven for the Mercedes works team a few years earlier
Is George Russell in the right place at the wrong time? The Brit is currently performing well at Mercedes, but to his chagrin, he joined the team just as the Silver Arrows’ dominance in Formula 1 was coming to an end.
Russell has been driving for Mercedes since 2022 and was promoted to the factory team after three years with customer Williams, which had just won its eighth consecutive constructors’ title at the end of 2021, setting a new Formula 1 record.
In his very first season with Mercedes, he finished ahead of his teammate Lewis Hamilton in the World Championship, and Russell told The Athletic: “Being a teammate of a seven-time world champion for three years is not easy.”
“There was a time when if you finished ahead of Lewis Hamilton in a championship or a race, you won the race. Or if you were ahead of him in the championship, you won the championship,“ said Russell.
His conclusion: ”If my time had come five years earlier, you could argue that I would have two championships to my name.” Between 2017 and 2020, Hamilton won the world championship four times in a row.
So, if Russell had already been driving for Mercedes back then, according to the calculation, and had beaten Hamilton as he did in two of the three years they spent together between 2022 and 2024, that would have been equivalent to winning the title.
However, the question is whether the duels between the two from 2022 onwards can really be “converted” so easily. This is because, at the same time as Russell’s move to Mercedes, the rules in Formula 1 changed fundamentally.
And the new ground-effect cars that have been in use since then do not suit Hamilton as well as the previous cars. So it is by no means certain that Russell would have beaten Hamilton with identical equipment before 2022.
The only “taste” of Russell’s ability during this period came at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix, when he replaced Hamilton, who was ill, in the factory Mercedes on a one-off basis. Under normal circumstances, Russell would probably have won that race.
In the end, a botched pit stop and a puncture cost him the victory.
