George Russell Says He’s Never Had a Season Like This After Another Hungarian GP Engine Failure

• George Russell says he has “never had a season like this” in his career after an anti-stall problem wrecked his start at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
• The Mercedes driver recovered from the back of the field to finish seventh but lost further ground to championship leader Kimi Antonelli, who is now 59 points clear of him.
• Russell says he is “past the point of disappointment” after a season that has already included a battery failure, a wrongly issued penalty and a race-ending collision.

George Russell says he cannot remember a season with this much misfortune, after an engine problem at the start of the Hungarian Grand Prix turned a promising weekend into another damage-limitation exercise.

Russell started Sunday’s race in sixth, one place ahead of Mercedes team-mate Kimi Antonelli, but his car went into anti-stall on the grid and he crept off the line before dropping to the back of the field on the run down to Turn 1. He fought his way back to finish seventh, but the lost afternoon cost him further ground in the title race behind Antonelli, who now leads Lewis Hamilton by 50 points and Russell himself by 59.

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“It was revving really high and really low”

Russell explained that he had barely touched the throttle before the problem appeared. “I was on the throttle waiting then all of a sudden the engine was going all over the place, it was revving really high and really low,” he told Sky Sports F1. The result was what he called a “terrible start” that undid the strong pace he had shown throughout the weekend before the lights even went out.

He did not try to hide his frustration, but was careful to spread the blame no further than it belonged. “Obviously the problems are happening, but the whole team feels it as well. They’re as p***** off as I am with how it’s unfolded,” Russell said. “We need to look at ourselves and ensure it’s nothing we’re doing wrong that is contributing to these errors. Oscar [Piastri] had his [gearbox] thing as well. It’s not like we’re the only one, but it does feel like it is happening substantially more to me than others.”

He added: “Hopefully it swings around. I don’t wish any bad luck on anyone. But I’ve never had a season like this in my whole career, let alone my F1 career.”

A season-long list of misfortune

Hungary was not an isolated incident. Russell suffered a battery failure while fighting Antonelli for the lead at the Canadian Grand Prix, a mechanical problem that dropped him out of what had been a straight fight for victory and cost him a large chunk of points in the process. In Monaco, he was handed a five-second penalty for a marginal pit lane speeding infringement, one of five drivers caught out by the same issue, and when the penalty was not served correctly under a late safety car it was converted into a drive-through, dropping him from third on the road to outside the points before a partial recovery. And he says he has been down on straight-line speed compared to his team-mate for much of the year, a disadvantage that contributed to a race-ending collision at the Belgian Grand Prix earlier this month.

Taken individually, each incident could be written off as ordinary racing misfortune. Strung together across a single campaign, they have turned what Russell clearly believes should have been a season fighting Antonelli at the front into one spent explaining, race after race, why the result did not reflect the pace in the car.

Mercedes remain ahead in the constructors’ championship, so the car underneath both drivers is not the problem. What has hurt Russell specifically is a run of software glitches, mechanical failures and stewarding calls landing on his side of the garage more often than Antonelli’s, at exactly the moments a strong result would have done the most for his own title bid.

Adding to the frustration, the driver closing in on him and Hamilton in the championship is his own team-mate. Antonelli finished third in Hungary as Russell fought back through the field behind him, and every point the teenager banks this season stretches the gap Russell now has to close from third in the standings.

Russell was also forced to change his power unit ahead of Sunday’s race after an engine crack appeared in qualifying, which could mean a grid penalty later in the year. Team principal Toto Wolff confirmed the team has not yet decided when that penalty might have to be taken. “In terms of engine penalties, I still very much hope we don’t need to take it. We need to decide when that is, when we need to take one and which tracks,” Wolff said.

Russell accepts some of the season’s problems sit with him. “There are things in my control I need to do better,” he said, while also pointing out that “there are a lot of things out of your control” that have compounded through the year.

“I’ve got to stay positive”

Rather than dwell on the latest setback, Russell said he has had to change how he processes each new problem as it arrives. “I’m sort of past the point of disappointment now, because if I continue to be disappointed with everything that goes on, I’ll just be disappointed every day of the week. So I’ve got to stay positive,” he said.

He pointed to his underlying pace in Hungary as the one genuine positive to take from the weekend. “The pace was very strong. The team said I was as strong as anybody out there, which I haven’t been there for probably three races, so I will take positives there,” Russell said. “But yeah, it’s just unbelievable the list of things that’s happened this season.”

That distinction, between the speed he showed once the anti-stall problem was behind him and the result it eventually produced, is the one Russell keeps returning to. It is also the reason his tone after Hungary was frustration rather than resignation. A driver who did not believe he had the pace to fight at the front would have little reason to describe a seventh-placed finish as a positive at all.

With the summer break now underway, Russell has three weeks to reset before Formula 1 resumes at the Dutch Grand Prix on August 21-23. He sits third in the drivers’ championship, 59 points behind Antonelli and nine behind Hamilton, still within reach of the fight at the front, but knows another race undone by circumstance beyond his control would make that gap far harder to close.

Russell has openly acknowledged that some of what has gone wrong this year sits within his own control, but the pattern he described in Hungary, strong underlying pace repeatedly undone by problems outside the cockpit, is the one he will be hoping does not follow him into the second half of the season.

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Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

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