Scott Gulbransen
George Russell has spent the better part of four years in F1 being the guy everyone agrees is really, really good — just not quite good enough. Not because he isn’t talented. He is. But talent without machinery is just a resume, and until now, the machinery was the problem.
That might be about to change.
F1 Changes Could Benefit Russell Most
F1 is throwing out nearly everything teams have spent the last four years perfecting. New power units. Active aerodynamics — meaning the car’s wings physically adjust to generate speed or grip depending on the situation, like a fighter jet trimming its flaps mid-flight. No more MGU-H, which was the turbo-recovery component that made starts and engine management a dark art. Shorter, lighter chassis. Flat floors instead of the venturi tunnels that produced the infamous “porpoising” that torpedoed Mercedes when the last major regulation change hit in 2022. It’s essentially a new sport layered on top of the old one, and Russell finds himself positioned better for it than at any point in his career.
The bookmakers agree. He’s the F1 pre-season title favorite, which either means Mercedes has genuinely cracked the new formula or that the betting markets are getting ahead of themselves. Possibly both.
“I think we’ve got a lot of potential beneath us,” Russell said in Bahrain last week, where Mercedes completed the most laps — 4324 — of any team during the testing. That number matters. Reliability is the unsung story of any new-car launch, and the W17 has behaved.
“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,” he added. “This is something we’ve not really experienced since 2021 as a team.”
That’s not small. In 2022, when ground-effect cars were introduced for F1, Mercedes showed up to Bahrain with a car that bounced violently down every straight. Nobody had predicted that. They spent the next three seasons chasing a problem that Red Bull and then McLaren never had. The trauma of that experience is baked into every cautious statement Russell and Toto Wolff have made this pre-season, and the caution itself is telling. These are people who have been burned before. When they say the car “reacted as anticipated,” that’s not corporate spin. That’s relief.
The Problem Plaguing George Russell Heading into Melbourne
Here’s the thing, though. Russell has a real weakness heading into Melbourne, and he’s not hiding it.
Race starts have always been a soft spot. Under the new regulations, the removal of the MGU-H means drivers have to manually prep the turbocharger before lights out, a technically demanding sequence that requires precise timing to get right. Ferrari, apparently, has figured something out. Lewis Hamilton’s practice at Bahrain was visually striking, clean, and fast in a way Russell’s simply wasn’t.
“The two starts I made this week were worse than my worst-ever start in Formula 1,” Russell said, which is the kind of quote that will appear in highlight reels if he loses the title by a handful of points in November. He’s not panicking, but he acknowledged the problem plainly: “At this moment, it matters less how fast you are, but how well you solve this problem.”
And that’s where it gets interesting. Because the competition doesn’t need much of an opening.
Max Verstappen is still Max Verstappen. Red Bull, for the first time, is running its own engine built in partnership with Ford, which sounds like a liability until you realize Red Bull’s chassis has been among the two or three best on the grid for the better part of a decade. During the first Bahrain test, their energy deployment — basically how efficiently the car uses electrical power out of corners and down straights — was, in Russell’s own words, “scary.” Mercedes claims to have closed that gap considerably by the end of testing. We’ll see what Melbourne says.
Fearrari’s Hamilton is racing for redemption in 2026. His move to Ferrari last season was the biggest storyline of the entire F1 offseason, a seven-time world champion leaving the team he won six of those titles with to take one last swing. Pre-season 2026 gave Ferrari the fastest raw pace of anyone in Week 2 of Bahrain testing. And then there’s Lando Norris, who won the 2025 drivers’ title with McLaren and has no intention of handing the sport back to anyone.
Russell addressed the Verstappen question directly and without flinching.
“I do want to go head-to-head with Max. And obviously, Lando had a great season last year,” Russell said. “I think he’s very much going to be in the fight this year. And you know, that is great. You obviously wish you’d have a slightly easier time of it. But it should never be easy.”
That’s the right attitude. It’s also the most honest thing anyone in the paddock has said this pre-season.
The Case for Russell Making a Push to the Top Now
The case for Russell is real: he’s 27, experienced, coming off his best personal season, driving for a team with genuine momentum and what sounds like a legitimate power unit advantage.
The case against is equally real: starts are broken, the field is genuinely open for the first time since 2021, and he’s never had to manage a full-season title fight before. Winning individual races is a different animal.
But the stars are aligned in a way they’ve never quite been. If the W17 is what those 500 laps in Barcelona suggest it might be, and if Russell figures out how to get off the line before the lights go out in Australia, this might finally be the Sunday we’ve been waiting for.
