George Russell: Red Bull must hold back

George Russell believes Red Bull Racing must hide their car’s true capabilities, despite Max Verstappen’s speed advantage in Melbourne being undeniable, and the Dutchman secured another victory.

The start of the Australian Grand Prix was the only moment when events unfolded, not in the way the two-time world champion would have liked: he didn’t start in the best way, let both Mercedes cars go through, but then bounced back without any problems.

Russell was in the lead in the early laps, but was unlucky: first he hurried to the pit stop when the safety car came out, but soon the race was stopped for the first time by red flags, and then he went completely out shut down due to power failure. For the rest of the Grand Prix’s events, George was already watching from the Mercedes team’s pits and saw how easily Verstappen was ahead of his partner, Lewis Hamilton, on the straight, after which he quickly began to increase the lead.

“Red Bull absolutely needs to hold back,” Russell said on BBC Radio 5 Live. – They are almost ashamed, they try not to show their full potential, because the faster they seem, the more actively the championship leadership will try to somehow slow them down.

In fact, they’re probably the fastest by about seven-tenths of a lap. I don’t know exactly what the difference in pace is now, but Max and Red Bull certainly have no reason to attack at full strength. Of course they are doing a great job, this cannot be taken away from them, so we definitely need to improve.”

As in the first two rounds of the season, the speed advantage of the RB19 in Melbourne was no longer reflected in qualifying, which Verstappen also won, but in race distance. After getting ahead of Hamilton on lap 12, it became clear how fast the Red Bull Racing car was: the next two laps Max was 0.5 and 0.7 seconds faster than Lewis.

In the second half of the race he increased the lead to 11 seconds, but lost part of it only after an unexpected mistake when he went off the track in the penultimate corner. Max got back easily though and kept the lead.

But Red Bull Racing is far from the first team that prefers not to reveal all the cards. In 2014, from the first year of the “hybrid era”, a period of unconditional dominance of Mercedes in the championship began, which sometimes also had to hide the true capabilities of its car, which the team management later admitted.

This approach was really explained by the fact that the factory team of the Stuttgart concern tried to avoid a situation where the management of Formula 1 begins to change the rules to allow others to overtake the leaders. Red Bull is certainly following the same course in 2023, even if they are not saying it out loud yet.