George Russell says a safety car triggered “one lap” later would have handed him victory in the Japanese Grand Prix. He finished fourth and surrendered the Drivers’ Championship lead to Mercedes team-mate Kimi Antonelli, who won and now leads by nine points after three rounds.
The safety car was deployed when Oliver Bearman crashed his Haas during the only sequence of pit stops, which effectively handed Antonelli a cheap stop and the lead. Before the incident Antonelli had been chasing McLaren’s Oscar Piastri, Russell and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc; those three had pitted under normal race conditions.
Russell was the last of that leading trio to stop and had come in only seconds before Bearman’s crash. Frustrated by how the timing unfolded, he told Sky Sports F1: “One lap difference and we’d have won the race, but then obviously we just made a meal of it thereafter.”
The safety car came in at the end of lap 27 of 53. Russell was third at that moment but lost places at the restart to Lewis Hamilton and Leclerc, later re-passing Hamilton to take fourth. He said he hit the harvest limit at the safety-car restart and couldn’t recharge his battery, which left him exposed: “I think a number of teams have had this problem on race starts. So I just got flew by from Lewis. And then obviously another battery issue with Charles, when he just flew by me and I was stood still. So, yeah, pretty frustrating. One lap difference and we’d have been having a different conversation.”
Could Russell’s assessment be accurate? If he had been able to take the advantage of the safety car stop he likely would have led the race, but Antonelli had been the quicker Mercedes throughout the day and had been closing fast before the safety car. A tyre change from medium to hard could have altered pace patterns, but Antonelli’s strong restart while Russell battled the Ferraris suggested he would still have been able to apply pressure even had he started the final stint behind his team-mate.
Oscar Piastri arguably suffered the most bad luck. He produced an excellent first stint, pitting early to avoid an undercut, and retained the lead over Russell after the Mercedes stop. Without the safety car he likely would have remained ahead once all front-runners had completed their pit sequences; whether he could have held off the Mercedes cars for the remainder of the race is uncertain, but his early defence suggested he would have had a fighting chance.
Russell’s weekend had already been compromised by a setup change made ahead of qualifying that left him short on pace. He qualified second, around three tenths off Antonelli, and had to manage an imperfect setup during the race. Both Mercedes drivers dropped places at the start, with Antonelli falling from pole to sixth and Russell from second to fourth.
Assessing the outcome, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said the setup mistake left Russell at a disadvantage: “The mistake that was made collectively really put George on the back foot with the car. From Q1, it was not good enough anymore and he had to fight with that too today.” Wolff added that pitting Russell when they did was intended to protect track position from Leclerc, but Antonelli’s consistently strong times made the difference: “With equal cars, it’s going to be close but the moment where it was about going fast, we had to decide to protect the position against Leclerc but Kimi was putting in perfect times, so that made the difference. But he [Russell] did not have a car that was perfect.”
Formula 1 resumes on May 1-3 with the Miami Grand Prix, the season’s second Sprint weekend, live on Sky Sports F1.