Russell: We need to understand what explains the tire problems

George Russell started from second place in the sprint in Austin on Saturday, but only finished fifth. The front tires of his Mercedes began to fail about halfway through the short race and he ultimately finished almost nine seconds behind the leader.

“I was driving fast at the start of the race but then the tires were completely worn out,” George told Sky Sports. “Both Ferrari drivers stayed right behind me and didn’t let me relax. If I had slowed down even a little bit, they would have benefited immediately.

Lewis also said after the race that there was almost nothing left of his rear tires. In general, we are definitely missing something, and we need to find out what explains our problems with tires. Today it is warmer than yesterday and for the first time we drove on Medium tires in race mode. Moreover, we drive faster when the weather is cool, and this is already a clear trend.

In practice we rode on the hard tires and they worked fine, you could attack them very aggressively, but on the Medium the picture changed definitively. It’s a shame I only finished fifth, but this is just a sprint and the main events take place tomorrow, so we still have the opportunity to make up for it.

If we talk about what happened in Turn 15, it so happened that I “left the door open” for the Ferrari drivers, but by the way I did not see them in the mirrors. But at that point in the race I was already going so slowly that I honestly felt like an idiot. It was clear that they would overtake me one way or another.

I had a lot of trouble in Turn 13 because I couldn’t accelerate out of it properly, so when the Ferrari drivers overtook me it wasn’t the most pleasant of moments.

I hope it will be colder on Sunday and that we can start with more confidence when we put the Hard tires on the cars.”