Why George Russell’s 2026 Struggles Feel Strangely Familiar.

This video is sponsored by Squarespace. I just struggle on these low-grip circuits, so Miami, Zambia, Brazil, it's something I wanna work on, but there are three tracks out of the 24 that are outliers, and Miami is definitely top of that list. George Russell's 2026 title charge isn't quite going to plan, is it? It's 3-1 to Andrea Chimi Antonelli when it comes to race wins, 4-2 in qualifying head-to-heads, .123 advantage, the Italian. There is plenty of F1 season to go, but he is only 20 points behind, but I think it's fair to say George Russell is in a bit of a sticky situation. But how bad has his season really been, and why do his complaints sound weirdly familiar? Well, my name's Tomo. Let's talk about it. Now, of course, we cannot reflect on George's 2026 season without reflecting on his pretty poor luck, let's be honest, because after taking a commanding pole-to-flag victory in Australia and winning the China Sprint, things looked like they couldn't get much better. The George Russell dominant championship was finally here, and then his Mercedes decided to have a bit of a diva moment, didn't it? A power unit issue in Q3 not only robbed him of his first push lap, but massively curtailed his ability to prepare for his second and only. I'm happy to be standing here in P2 because I started the last lap, had no battery, no tyre temp, no nothing. Antonelli took that pole position just over a couple of tenths clear of Russell, and that track position paid dividends on Sunday. With both Ferraris cooking off the line, both Scholl and Lewis were consistently able to put themselves between the two Mercedes boys, George unable to make inroads on his teammate, even though, on balance, in my opinion, he edged it over the weekend in terms of pace. Then we go to Japan, and after it looked pretty close over the practice sessions, it was Kimi who emerged on pole, just under three tenths clear of George. Now that was a special lap from Antonelli. He was the quicker Mercedes driver on Saturday. He absolutely deserved that result. The problem for him was, of course, his start. Although both Mercedes did lose position off the start, it was Kimi more so, however. So by the time both had recovered and got back to one and two, it was advantage George. And of course, teammate ahead gets priority on pit stop, right? So why wouldn't you box George on lap 22? It's a no-brainer, right? It's not like anyone's gonna have a 50-kilometer-an-hour speed differential crash going into Spoon Corner. Oh, of course, that's exactly what happened. I actually counted. So it was literally 11 seconds from George Russell passing the pit lane exit line to the yellow flag flashing up on the screen. Turns out lap 22 was one lap too early. Kimi boxed, took advantage of the cheap safety car, and leapfrogged ahead. So bad luck for George, but no worries because he could recover it off of the race restart. No. Lewis Hamilton literally immediately overtook George after a bug on his battery meant he had zero deployment on the restart. That put him down to P4, which became P5. Nine laps later, after another deployment issue, saw Charles Leclerc soon to pass through him going into Spoon. George would recover to P4 in the end, but he said it himself post-race. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. One lap different and we'd be having probably a very different conversation. Look, I think objectively, if you roll back those first three weekends again, George quite realistically could have come away with three race and one sprint win. 83 points out of 83. Jobs are good, and instead he was sat with 63, nine shy of his teammate, Kimi Antonelli. Now that's not the end of the world, far from it, but just ask Max, you never know how a few lost points here or there can impact the season by the end. But anyway, April break, back in Miami. Time to go again and be super competitive. No. Significantly slower than Kimi all weekend, a distant second best to his teammate, plus all the other teams have caught up. Great. The plan might not be working out great for George Russell right now, but what about a plan with Squarespace? Today's video sponsor. If you wanna build your very own beautiful online home, a website you can be proud of, today's video sponsor, Squarespace, is the place to go. Thousands of beautiful drag and drop templates, blueprint AI design, intelligent software making it an absolute breeze to bring something together. Super smart, no coding knowledge needed. Trust me, that is the biggest thing that scared me from getting a website earlier than I did. Then I've had a Squarespace website since 2018. Whether you've got an online store, whether you wanna run a blog, whether you've got a portfolio of work to show off to the world, whatever the reason might be, a website could work for you. Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial, so when you're ready to give it a go, head to squarespace.com slash tomof1 to get 10% off of your very first website or domain once you're ready to go live. Now, poor luck was not the order of the day in Florida. Instead, George, pretty graciously, in a way, held his hands up and essentially said, you know, my bad, like, skill issue. It's just a track that I've always struggled with. Last year, Kimmy was on pole for the sprint, and I was P5. Today, he's pole, and I am P5. It's not really a major cause for concern, it's just I know this is a real struggle for me. Low grip, really hot temperatures. And that's the part, to me, that sounds pretty familiar, because as much as I can't find an example of him outwardly coming out and saying it himself, Oscar Piastri's 2025 title challenge faltered due to similar skill gaps in his ability. It was Mexico last season when Andreas Stella went on record and gave us a bit more information and context around Oscar's struggles, given he'd just had a second pole weekend in a row after Austin and then Mexico. Two Grand Prix where Lando, on the other side of the garage, had taken a P2 and a P1. We reviewed with Oscar extensively from a data comment video point of view, and I think we extracted some important information in terms of how the car needs to be driven in these special low grip conditions that we are facing here in Mexico. You have to drive the car in a way that adapts to the fact that the car slides a lot and can slide and produce lap time. This is not necessarily the way in which Oscar feels naturally that he is producing lap time. His instincts, any loss of grip, any sliding is lost lap time, so you minimise that, whereas a track like Mexico, seemingly, and like Miami, you can dance the line of adhesion and still extract lap time. Oscar himself as well alluded to this misunderstanding at the time. I've had to drive very differently the last couple of weekends, or I have not driven differently when I should have. That has been a little bit strange to get my head around because I've been driving the same as I have all year. And that kind of does somewhat explain, and I'm sure you know the pressure and getting late on in the season, leading the championship like he was prior to Austin, you know, that pressure on top of driving, needing to drive in a style that just doesn't come naturally to you. I can see why that gap opened up between him and Lando. And again, how quickly it happened, I can understand why there were so many conspiracy theories about McLaren favouritism, but I never thought that was the case and I still don't now. Because George's struggles in Miami, that's nothing to do with the team favouring Kimi. Like, come on, it's the car sliding too much, it's an inability to adapt, it's going against his natural style, and this all seems to correlate just as much for Oscar last year as it does George this. Give this video a hype, because that's a new thing on YouTube, and that should hopefully help it grow and flourish, and then I can pay for more mint and treats. So then if we are going to draw parallels between the two and say George and Oscar struggle with the same things, well, George has identified Miami, Zanvort, Brazil as bogey circuits, but what about Mexico and Austin as well? Like, Piastri struggled around both, so will George as well? I mean, again, it's not that simple, these things don't 100% correlate. I mean, Oscar won in Miami last season, helped of course by Max's elbows out on Lando lap one, and George took his debut F1 win in Sao Paulo in Brazil in 2022. It's more than just the track itself, isn't it? Of course, the track surface is important, but also ambient and track temperature as well. It's this amalgamation of factors that drivers like George and Oscar just, yeah, have more trouble adapting to than the likes of Kimi and Lando, and also you could extend that to the most adaptable drivers in F1, be that Max, be that Fernando, be that Charles. And Oscar Piastri found out the hard way last year that if you can't adapt in these outlier conditions, for want of a better term, that can derail your entire World Championship. Especially if your teammate is hyper-competitive, which Lando was last year, and Kimi certainly is this year as well. Now look, we can't forget that Antonelli did have his own struggles, especially in the European leg last season, struggling to get performance down around tracks that he knew, but then brought too many assumptions because of that knowledge. At least that was the explanation from Mercedes' Andrew Shovlin. But the difference here is that that was debut season for Kimi, he's 18 years of age. George Russell is 28 in his eighth year now. So it does, on one hand, concern me that George is out here putting his hands up, basically saying this is a gap in my ability, whereas my literal second season teammate, even Kimi last year, put it on pole in the sprint. So this is something that is amazing from Kimi, but also concerning for George. But also, there is another side to it. It does kind of go both ways, because yes, Kimi has an ignorance of youth, freedom that comes with being fresh, and that's working well for him right now. But how will that change when these things inevitably start to go wrong? The roadblocks that everyone comes across when fighting for a World Championship. It's never a perfect season, is it? What about when he has poor race pace and doesn't really understand why? What if he has a crash in qualifying? Issues with the car, even, because Kimi's not really had too many difficult downshifts at times, but nothing crazy. You would expect that Russell's experience would put him in a better position to deal with the inevitable issues along the way, and not let it derail his entire season. Because George right now is playing down these issues in Miami, emphasizing on the focus of each race as it comes, because that's exactly what he should be doing. You ask any top athlete in any sport the same kind of question. They're just gonna say the same thing, you know? Just take each race, take each match, take each event as it comes. Focus on the things you can control, blah, blah, blah. The pace was really poor on my side. I've got some ideas, to be honest, so I used the last sort of 20 laps to kind of test for myself, try out some quite drastic changes with my driving style and some of the differential and brake settings on my car, and it improved things. But I just can't wait for the next race where it'll be slightly more normal conditions. Yeah, no major cause for concern. I did notice during the broadcast, George kind of seemingly randomly coming out on the radio and saying something along the lines of, you know, the pace is much better now. And we also heard him say this post-race to his race engineer, Marcus Dudley. That was weird. I changed some settings, diffs, and brake magic, and found a lot of lap time, so need to review that. Look, the best time for George to have had pace around Miami is Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The second best time is now. I hope for him this 20 laps of almost testing, in a way, will have unlocked some kind of understanding because you have to be prepared for these high-temp, low-grip conditions bubbling up down the line. Like, we know George is absolutely capable in most conditions, right, of doing incredible things in this sport. He is a top-tier F1 driver, no question. But especially now that the McLaren's all of a sudden looking way more competitive, Ferrari have taken a step forwards, Red Bull have taken a massive step forwards, George hasn't just got his teammates to worry about in order to win this title now. So the sooner he can get on top of this, the better. Now, Canada has been a very happy hunting ground over recent years for George Russell. He took the win last year at P3 podium in 24 as well. I'm not surprised he expects things to be much better. Like, even when it is hot in Canada, like it was in 22, like, it's nothing compared to the absolute sweatbox that is Florida. And of course, there are upgrades coming Mercedes way. Toto has spoken about them being kind of out of sync with the rest of the field with their upgrades, taking a bit of extra time to refine them and make sure they're happy with what they're putting on the car rather than rushing them onto the car in Miami. And of course, Kimi still won the race, so that decision is somewhat vindicated. In terms of individual upgrade pieces, I mean, McLaren and Red Bull both put seven, Ferrari, 11. But I'd argue Ferrari took the least relative impressive step compared to McLaren and Red Bull. So yes, very interested to see what Mercedes bring in Canada and how quickly George and Kimi both adapt to what will probably be a very new car underneath them. But also, like, we are gonna gradually start getting close to diminishing returns with these upgrades. Yes, I know we're only four rounds into these new regulations, but these teams are very bloody clever. Also, we've got a two-week break now where the teams who brought big changes can go back to the drawing board, analyse, check what's happened, and then take a car that they know into Canada. Whereas again, Mercedes, they've got a very good formula right now, but they need to upgrade it. They need to make a change. And will this be a positive change? Will this be a McLaren, Red Bull-esque immediate uptick in performance? Very, very good. Or will this be more of a Ferrari one where it's a step in the right direction but nowhere near as strong? And look, George will know this. I think as drivers go, he's got as big an ego as any of them, right? He will know he had the pace to win in Australia because he did. He will know he was quick enough to win around China and certainly in Japan, you know, it was close, but he could have won that and all. Miami is the only performance block on his scorecard, but Canada, he can go and right some wrongs. So there is no real need to panic. He's doing the right thing and it's not this kind of cope, this immature Twitter perspective on how George is dealing with things. This is how top athletes deal with problems. They don't wallow. They put their hands up, they accept it, and they move on. It's just a shame we've got to wait two weeks to see how he bounces back, eh? Let me know in the comments below what you think of George Russell's start to the season, how it's been covered as well. It's been nowhere near as bad as I think people are making it out to be. And if you're a George Russell fan as well, is this something you've seen as a weakness in his style for a while? Because I've got to be honest, I never really noticed this being an issue in the past. I just thought he was pretty mustered everywhere, but nobody's perfect. My name's Tom Moyer. Thanks again. Have a good one. Ta-ta.