George Russell has done something F1 drivers rarely do mid-title fight: he has put his hand up and admitted there are circuits on the 2026 calendar where his style does not work. Speaking after Miami, where Andrea Kimi Antonelli took pole and Russell finished a quiet P5, the Mercedes driver was unusually direct about why.
"I just struggle on these low grip circuits," Russell told reporters in Florida. "So Miami, Zandvoort, Brazil, it's something I want to work on, but there are three tracks out of the 24 that are outliers, and Miami is definitely top of that list."
He doubled down later in the same media session, framing the result as a known weakness rather than a freak weekend. "Last year, Kimi was on pole for the sprint and I was P5. Today, he's pole and I'm P5," Russell said. "It's not really a major cause for concern. It's just I know this is a real struggle for me. Low grip, really hot temperatures."
The parallel with Oscar Piastri's late-2025 implosion is hard to miss. After leading the championship into the autumn, Piastri lost his title charge across the Austin and Mexico City weekends, where Lando Norris took a P2 and a victory while Piastri was nowhere. At the time, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella was unusually open about what had gone wrong.
"We reviewed with Oscar extensively from a data comment video point of view, and I think we extracted some important information in terms of how the car needs to be driven in these special low grip conditions," Stella said in Mexico last October. "You have to drive the car in a way that adapts to the fact that the car slides a lot and can slide and produce lap time. This is not necessarily the way in which Oscar feels naturally that he is producing lap time."
Piastri himself reached the same conclusion, several races too late. "I've had to drive very differently the last couple of weekends, or I have not driven differently when I should have," Piastri admitted at the time. "That has been a little bit strange to get my head around because I've been driving the same as I have all year."
The diagnostic line on Russell is now the same. F1 analyst Tommo, in a video published this month, argued the Mercedes driver is dealing with the exact failure mode that cost Piastri the 2025 championship: a natural style built around minimising slide and chasing adhesion, which becomes a tax on lap time at tracks where the surface forces drivers to live on the edge of grip. Antonelli, Tommo argued, has the same youthful adaptability that worked for Norris last year.
Russell has at least started to engineer his way around it. After Miami, he revealed he spent the closing stint of the race testing setup changes on himself rather than trying to recover positions. "I used the last sort of 20 laps to kind of test for myself, try out some quite drastic changes with my driving style and some of the differential and brake settings on my car, and it improved things," Russell said. Over the team radio at the end, he made the point even more bluntly to race engineer Marcus Dudley: "I changed some settings, diffs and brake magic and found a lot of lap time. So need to review that."
Canada, where Russell won last year, takes the pressure off in the short term. But with Zandvoort and Interlagos still to come — and Antonelli already nine points clear in the standings — Russell has put a deadline on himself to crack a problem that almost broke Piastri.
Source: youtube.com