George Russell is preparing for his first-ever season as a Mercedes driver in Formula One.
He will be teammates with fellow Brit on the grid, Lewis Hamilton who is also a seven-time World Champion.
As Lewis Hamilton seeks his eighth Championship win and redeems himself after the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix showdown, George Russell will look into learning more from Lewis Hamilton, as he did during his time in the Mercedes Junior Programme.
During his time with Williams in Formula One, Russell impressed the grid with his great performances in Qualifying with a low-performance car. This earned him the nickname of Mr Saturday.
During the 2021 season, Russell also helped Williams score points for the first time in two years, and their first podium in four years.
This happened after Russell managed to finish second in Q3 on Saturday. Due to heavy rain, the Belgian Grand Prix in Spa could not go ahead and everyone earned half the points and Williams achieved a second-place finish.
Now that Russell is working closer than ever to Hamilton, he expressed his thoughts on their relationship.
The 24-year old said, “My working relationship with Lewis over the past three years hasn’t been as close as it probably was four or five years ago when I was a junior driver.
“Seeing him work week in week out, it always amazes me how somebody so talented and successful as Lewis continues to strive for more and that is incredibly inspiring and motivational for me as a young driver to try and reach the height Lewis has achieved.
“What an opportunity for me to be his teammate, to learn from him and see how he goes about his business.
“I think we have a really good relationship between the two of us and we can really work well together to push the team forward.”
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With the new rules that came into place this year, Mercedes are looking to have both drivers and all engineers working together to make sure that they have the best-performance car on the grid.
The new rules this year leave many unknowns and while the teams already collected some data from the testing in Barcelona, they now go again to Bahrain to learn even more about how the car performs in different conditions.
It also gives the drivers more time to adapt to the car, maybe give suggestions to each other on how they can feel more comfortable and to the engineers to make sure that the right adjustments are made.
Russell was asked about whether his driving style is similar to that of Hamilton and he did not beat around the bush with his answer.
He admitted, “It is a question, when asked, what is my driving style, I answer truly when I say I don’t really know.
“I want to be adaptable to the situation. I wouldn’t say I’m especially smooth, I wouldn’t say I’m very aggressive either.
“From what I’ve seen, I do think we have a similar way of driving where we always try to find the limit of the tyre, but not often trying to go over the limit. We’re pretty smooth in our general approach.
“I think we’ll be in a very similar boat and I have no doubt we’ll be working well together.”
George Russell is ready to work hand-in-hand with Hamilton, but as the season play out, do you think that Russell will look at learning from Hamilton during his first season in a championship-winning car or will he look at obtaining great results and beat his teammate?