In 2024 George Russell and Lewis Hamilton finished over 45 seconds behind winner Max Verstappen as the season got under way in Bahrain. Thirteen months on, Russell split the supreme McLarens in second place as the Silver Arrows appeared to pass an important stress test.
As Red Bull wrestles with car balance and grip woes and Ferrari is also struggling to keep up over a race distance, Mercedes has manoeuvred itself in the position of McLaren’s closest challenger so far. Russell’s third podium in four races – across different layouts – is showcasing a consistency he couldn’t achieve with the less pliable 2024 car.
Ahead of the weekend Russell felt Bahrain’s desert heat and Sakhir’s rough tarmac would be the real test of how much Mercedes has been able to progress, and the performance on Sunday appeared to confirm that step.
“We would have expected that Bahrain would have been one of the very difficult ones for us because of the warm ambient temperature and the very granular, rough circuit,” team principal Toto Wolff said when Motorsport.com asked him if he felt Mercedes had passed its Bahrain stress test.
“We qualified P2 and P4. We had a car that was able to be solidly on the podium, and that is better than we expected. You can [only] call a race a success if you win, but in the circumstances one could say it was much better than we expected.”
The caveat remains that catching its customer team McLaren will still be hard to pull off as Oscar Piastri won at a canter, 15 seconds ahead of Russell, although the gap was exaggerated by Piastri being on the preferred medium tyres for the second half of the race, while Russell was battling soft tyre wear as well as electrical gremlins on his car.
“If you look at where McLaren was last year [Lando Norris and Piastri finished sixth and eighth in 2024], you can see how quickly you can turn the tide,” Wolff said. “Probably today we were missing a few tenths. I don’t know how we would have performed on the medium at the end.
George Russell, Mercedes, Toto Wolff, Mercedes
Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images
“When a car is performing in the way that McLaren does, then it’s everything. It’s just good engineering. They have the performance in the chassis, and they are able to nurture the tyres better than everybody else. And they have a great engine…”
Mercedes hasn’t been able to determine yet what caused Russell’s brake-by-wire failure and the other electronic issues that made his final 20 laps so difficult, but given the distractions he was facing Wolff felt Russell’s drive was “unbelievable”.
“We had a brake-by-wire failure suddenly, and then it took a while to find the settings and still kind of reset it,” he explained. “And then, him managing the system whilst having Norris behind him, it’s just an unbelievable drive, to be honest.
“Taking the soft for such a long time was also great, between managing and then attacking when he needed to. That was just very good skill. We didn’t have all the things that we expected, and we also feared that we would lose the whole dash.
“Obviously, he had [the issue] in the shift lights, and he had it in the back of the mind, and it didn’t take his concentration away.”
