George Russell sat down with CNN this week and was handed a fairly loaded question: David Coulthard reckons the way to handle a rookie teammate who happens to be leading the World Championship is to lean on him, work the psychological angle, get in his head a bit. Did Russell agree?
He did not.
“That’s not how I go about my business,” Russell told CNN, before drawing a line between drivers who win cleanly and those who win through what he called gamesmanship. He pointed to Lewis Hamilton as a role model, a driver who has won “in a fair and dignified way,” and made clear he sees mind games as something other champions have done, not something he plans to start doing now.
“I know what I stand for,” he said. “I don’t need to win through any of those.”
Which is a perfectly reasonable answer, except for the small matter of the standings.
Why This Question Is Even Being Asked
Andrea Kimi Antonelli is 19 years old, in his rookie season, and currently leads the Formula 1 Drivers’ Championship. That sentence still looks strange written down.
The Italian was promoted into the Mercedesseat vacated by Hamilton’s move to Ferrari, and while he went through the usual rookie adjustment period of qualifying mistakes and Sunday damage limitation, he has spent this year on pole positions, podiums, and the top of the points table. Russell, the established team leader, the one who was supposed to inherit Mercedes when Hamilton left, is left chasing his own teammate.
That’s the context Coulthard was speaking to.
Experience is one of the few things Russell has that Antonelli doesn’t, and the conventional wisdom in F1 is that you use every advantage available, including the psychological ones. Plenty of past champions built careers on it. The paddock has always had a soft spot for the driver willing to make a teammate’s life uncomfortable on the pitwall, in the media pen, and on track at Turn 1.
The Briton is refusing to play that game, which is both admirable and, depending on how the next few races go, possibly a little expensive. There’s a version of this season where the high road costs him a title. There’s also a version where Antonelli, still a teenager, makes the kind of mistake that 19-year-olds make when the pressure becomes real, and Russell is able to capitalize on it.
But Russell would rather lose his way than win someone else’s. But Coulthard’s advice exists because, historically, most drivers in Russell’s position eventually take it.