George Russell nursed an ailing Mercedes W16 to his best result of F1 2025 so far in Bahrain as he crossed the line runner-up.

Battling electrical issues, a braking problem and surviving a post-race FIA investigation over a potential DRS infringement, Russell still was able to hold off McLaren’s Lando Norris and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc to record his and Mercedes‘ strongest result of the season, and keep himself comfortably in the mix with the Drivers’ Championship frontrunners.

Mercedes uncover ‘frazzled and charred’ transponder: Key clue found?

The F1 2025 campaign moves on quickly to this weekend’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, the final round of the first triple header of the season, but as Mercedes set about starting investigations into Russell’s reliability scares in Bahrain, team representative Bradley Lord revealed Mercedes found what could be a vital clue, that being a destroyed timing transponder.

Lord would go into detail over exactly how this component is interlinked with other key systems on the W16, as he explained just how hard Russell had to work to keep his car going and secure that P2 result.

Asked to explain what happened with Russell in Mercedes’ post-Bahrain GP debrief video, Lord began: “First thing to say is probably from the TV broadcast it sounded like the final 10 laps. Actually, it was from about half distance that we had the first sign of a problem.

“So, the first thing that happened, and it’s worth saying we haven’t got the root causes yet so we’ve just arrived back in the factory with about 10 different suitcases of parts and items that we’re bringing back, including a pretty frazzled and sort of charred looking FOM timing transponder and then some other bits of kit as well related to the brake by wire system, so we haven’t got root causes yet.

“But what we know is that we lost the timing transponder just before half distance actually and so suddenly there was one lap where we were like what’s going on because George’s name just plummeted down the time sheets and we were kind of thinking, ‘Okay no, he’s still on track, he’s still talking on the radio so there’s a timing issue here rather than something else’.

“But what that also had as a knock-on effect is if you lose the timing transponder, you lose the part of the car that interacts with the DRS mechanism so for activating DRS, for knowing whether you’re within a second or another car is within a second of you.

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“We therefore had to resort to a backup system so we talked to the FIA, we get permission to do that, and then George is effectively operating the DRS system in manual mode.

“At the same time we started to have a separate but parallel problem with the brake by wire, so that’s the electronics that determine the braking force between front and the rear brakes, but particularly on the rear brakes there’s the chunk of braking that is done by the MGU-K, so the electric motor on the engine, and then the chunk done by the hydraulic braking system.

“And so when we go into what we call passive mode, you’re just relying on those hydraulic brakes, but it changes the car’s behaviour under braking and ultimately it’s very, very difficult to run the car like that because you’re just losing a lot of braking force and you ultimately overheat those much smaller hydraulic rear brakes.

“So George was battling with that. We had to do what’s called a default change for him so that he could toggle in and out of that brake by wire when it went to passive and put it back in the active mode in those last 10 laps, so I think over those last 10 laps he was making sort of 20, or between 20 and 30, changes to that setting as he was also driving, hitting his braking points and keeping first Leclerc and then ultimately Lando behind him as well.

“So incredible sort of acrobatics I guess at the wheel, but in parallel we had this DRS problem and we didn’t know what further knock-on effects it might have and the big fear was that it would knock out the dashboard completely, so the whole steering wheel display.

“If that happens, we can continue driving because there are failsafe and backup systems in the car that mean we can still change gear, we can still use the DRS and we can still use the radio and so we have a backup radio system in the car that isn’t located on the steering wheel. It’s a button down in the cockpit. That button as it turns out is also the backup and the manual backup for the DRS if that fails.

“And so George was cycling through a practice to go to the backup radio just in case it was needed, pressed that backup radio button and inadvertently on the back straight also opened the DRS because it does the two things at the same time. He realised it within an instant, braked, closed the DRS and continued. That’s when we heard him come on the radio.

“That was what the stewards looked at and investigated and ultimately decided there was no further action for it after the race.

“So yeah, it was kind of like an acrobat spinning plates as he was going through those last few laps and it’s what made his drive ultimately so impressive not just to have the mental bandwidth to cope with that, but also to be doing the driving, making no mistakes, fending off Lando, keeping Leclerc out of striking distance as well. It was a really incredible performance.”

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