Google News George Russell: Probably a factor of taking it too cautiously
by | VIEW 235
George Russell is not satisfied with his performance at the Mexico GP and believes that he was too 'cautious' “I knew I wouldn't have been able to overtake Max [Verstappen] on the outside,” Russell said, talking about the first lap, as quoted by motorsport.com “But having Lewis on the inside I didn't want to be too aggressive, obviously him being my team-mate.
“And ultimately that that cost me and caused me to lose two positions. So ultimately if I had managed to maintain position, I probably would have finished second today”. He believes that he would leave space for anyone, not just his teammate “Yeah, I think it was more in Turn 1 to be honest, I would have ordinarily just chopped across or in Turn 2 I would have run the driver wide.
So yeah, that's the way the game works sometimes. I'd like to think it would have been the same had it been the other way around. Maybe, maybe not, I'm not too sure. But I've had a bit of a scrappy last three races on my behalf, too many incidents, too many mistakes.
And that was probably a factor of taking it too cautiously. And there's a balance in there somewhere”.
Positivities
However, Russell believes that there were a lot of positives. “Lots of positives to take away from the weekend,” he said.
“It would have also been interesting to see how we performed had we started on the soft and gone to the medium, or even if we extended the medium and went to the soft at the end. That was what I was pushing for in the car.
Everything's easier in hindsight”. He also spoke about strategy choice. “There was no real thought about starting on the soft, but there was definitely a thought of extending the medium, and going into the soft.
“I'm not too sure, I think we reacted to [Nicholas] Latifi and Lewis, they both put the hard on and were setting green sectors everywhere. But the hard tyre just did not work from lap two onwards. “I think generally this weekend Pirelli brought too hard a compound.
So the soft should have been a medium, the medium should have been the hard, and the hard was like an ultra hard, effectively. “So seeing Ricciardo's performance is a little bit disappointing as well, because I really felt like I could have continued on that medium at a good pace, and we would have been flying at the end on that soft”.