Mercedes or George Russell: Who was at fault for shock Hungary Q1 elimination?

George Russell was eliminated in Q1 during qualifying for the Hungarian GP. The Mercedes driver will start tomorrow’s race in 17th position and will have a difficult task to fight his way back into the points.

George Russell is coming off the back of victory in Austria and pole position at Silverstone, however, strange track conditions and subsequent events in Q1 of the Hungarian GP saw him out in Q1, ahead of only both Alpine drivers and Zhou Guanyu.

George Russell should take large part of blame for Q1 exit

Toto Wolff has been very critical of the entire team and his drivers for this situation. But who was really to blame for this shocking elimination?

George Russell was one of the last drivers to go out on track in Q1 alongside Lewis Hamilton and Sergio Perez. The first lap of Q1 was key to setting a competitive first lap time. Lewis Hamilton set a 1:17.087 on his first attempt, which was good enough for second in Q2 despite the final track improvement.

In his first attempt, Russell was very conservative in track conditions still difficult due to the rain that had fallen at the end of the F2 race, and he also encountered traffic in Sector 2 which made him nine tenths slower than Hamilton only at this point.

Despite this, Russell had two more attempts before Sergio Perez triggered the red flags, which also damaged his qualifying options.

On the second attempt, the Mercedes driver managed to improve his time by just under three tenths of a second, but was again hampered by traffic at the final corner with drivers in their outlaps and preparing for a push lap looking for some space between them.

On the last attempt before the red flag caused by Perez, Russell had improved his first sector, but made a driving mistake and went wide at turn 8. A mistake that caused him to abort the lap and pit without a final cooling lap before refueling the W15.

Up to that point, Russell was P14 just two positions ahead of P16, which marks the cut-off between the eliminated drivers and those who move on to Q2.

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During the 11-minute red flag, light rain started to fall. The track got a bit wetter and the drivers who delivered the first laps after the session restarted were affected. One of them was George Russell himself.

The Mercedes driver improved again after a slow Sector 1 and moved up to P10, setting the best final sector so far. But there were still all the drivers behind to set a time with the positive evolution of the track and consequent lap time improvements.

At this point, Russell was only doing push laps. And in his second push lap after the red flag he again encountered traffic which prevented him from improving his overall lap time despite improving his personal Sector 1.

George Russell then entered the pits. Mercedes didn’t put enough fuel in to have a final attempt, although he certainly should have set a safe time to make the cut by that time. His driving error before the red flag and the traffic he encountered on track severely damaged him.

Therefore, a large part of the blame for this disaster lies with the driver. We just have to look at Lewis Hamilton: with his first attempt and only using a set of soft tyres he made the cut to Q2 with the same lap time he set at the start of the session.

It is also true that with a last lap without traffic and with enough fuel in the tank he could have made the cut. Mercedes pulled the driver out at the logical time with the threat of rain, but perhaps they should have put in one or two more laps of fuel to ensure Russell would have had all the push laps available to him to make it through to Q2.

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