George Russell “lucky to finish P7” at Imola GP in “dead slow” Mercedes

George Russell delivered a damning assessment of his Mercedes team’s performance in the F1 Imola Grand Prix – saying they were “dead slow” and lucky to finish as high as they did.

Russell came home in seventh place while his team-mate Andrea Kimi Antonelli retired from the race, as the team battled against rising temperatures.

Russell says the heat is causing him and Mercedes a headache as they have poor performance when the temperatures go up – a problem stretching back to last year that the team has been unable to solve.

When asked if it was just an unfortunate weekend in which he failed to score decent points, Russell told Sky Sports F1: “No, we were definitely not [with] bad luck, we were just dead slow.

“I mean the trends are pretty clear, when it’s hot we’re slow, when it’s cold we’re quick, and that was the same last year. We’ve been doing everything with the set-up to try and find solutions, but there’s clearly something more fundamental in the car.

“It’s not the first race of the season where we’ve been slower than Ferrari, and even slower than Williams, or the same pace as Williams, but we’ve just somehow managed to get a result out of it on these occasions. But today, we were very lucky to finish P7, in all honesty.”

Russell says he identified the problem on his reconnaissance lap to the grid for the start and reported the issue to his engineers, but they could not detect the source of what was causing him to feel uncomfortable with the car.

He added: “It was very odd. I mean on the laps to the grid I was reporting problems with the car and I thought something was wrong. The team had a good look around and saw nothing and that feeling continued for 60-odd laps after.

“We do have a bit of a fundamental [issue] because either the fronts are overheating, or the rears are overheating, circuit to circuit. But it’s not the first time we’ve reported that. So it was probably just the first time where all of our rivals probably had a semi-decent race.”