It’s easy to say George needs to sort out his performance, to the point where it’s almost fashionable to say it. That he’s all but lost the championship to Kimi Antonelli, something George had already admitted before his win at Baku a couple of weeks ago reminded him that racing can be fun.

It’s also really easy to find George Russell hate around the social medias. His crimes extend to looking like an animated character and being, reasonably, proud of what he has achieved.

But since starting the season as favourite for the championship, cementing that with a victory at the Aussie Grand Prix, he’s more or less had a shocker of a season since. After winning the opening round of the season it took him seven more races to win again. Then another seven races to win for a third time. This means his next race win will the season finale in Abu Dhabi (assuming there is a finale there…)

If he kept crashing it would be understandable to blame him, or even worse, simply underperforming. But George’s problems have been more varied:

• Chance going the wrong way, such as pitting the lap before the safety car came out in Japan (thanks to Ollie Bearman’s super clipping assisted shunt)

• Ongoing power unit related issues, such as at Japan, Belgium, Britain, etc.

• Race ending mechanical failures at Canada, Malaysia-Bahrain, as well as other intermittent issues.

• Being assisted into a gravel trap, such as at the Belgian GP by Lewis Hamilton.

There has been performance issues, and George has spoken openly about not trusting the car for one reason or another, for even struggling with his driving style.

But we’ve also seen hints that within the team things aren’t great. Back at the Miami Grand Prix, we saw Kimi win and George finish 43 seconds back. This was back when the Mercedes cars were still struggling with the launch procedures and would lose a handful of places off the line. When asked about this start line loss, Toto’s response was, “We let them down again.”

Then, when asked about George losing positions after the safety car restart, he suggested George was somehow getting it wrong with the restart by using the wrong engine mode. That is, the bad restarts were George’s fault, but the team was letting Kimi down with the bad race starts.

Of course, the usual caveat that these are observations from the outside, and we can’t know what’s going on within the team. But, a few races later, on the in lap after the British Grand Prix, won by Charles Leclerc, George mentioned deployment related issues with his power unit, and Toto Wolff’s response was, to paraphrase, “stop whining.”

That Toto has a bias towards Kimi is very hard to deny. George has put in solid results at both Williams and Mercedes, is worthy of his race seat, but the team seems to allow so much speculation regarding George’s race seat. We saw months of this throughout 2024 when Lewis was serving out the remainder of his contract, with almost endless Max Verstappen chat.

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Sidenote: Lewis Hamilton has put in some excellent drives so far this season, it makes me wonder whether anyone at Mercedes regrets implying he was too old to perform. Not that Kimi Antonelli is underperforming, but what could Lewis have achieved in that car?

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And now that Toto Wolff has his dear Kimi in the team, he seems to struggle to say anything positive about George Russell. Again, it’s hard to tell how much of this is down to editing in terms of the comparative quantity of Kimi chat, but the quality of his George chat isn’t as good.

Is this how Toto is ‘managing the rivalry’ between his drivers? Taking a quick look back to the beginning of the last era of Mercedes dominance, we had Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton who could barely stand to be in the same room as each other. I’m going to hazard a guess and say that the lack of sparks between their two current drivers is mostly down to their temperament.

But how does that help George now? Yea, well….