George Russell has called the collapse of his 2026 title challenge “tough to deal with” after watching his Mercedes team-mate Kimi Antonelli become Formula 1’s youngest world champion at the Mexico City Grand Prix.
The 28-year-old won the season-opening race in Australia and started the year as the championship favourite. Antonelli has now won nine races to Russell’s three. The Italian sealed the title with third place in Mexico City on Sunday with four races still to run. Russell finished sixth after a 10-second penalty and dropped to fourth in the standings.
“Now feels like a pretty suitable moment to speak from the heart,” Russell wrote on Instagram on Monday evening. “This season started off exactly how I had hoped but it very quickly unravelled with tough luck and poor performances. It’s been the first proper season of my career where I’ve had more bad days than good.”
‘Confusion at times? Often’
Russell answered his own questions in the post. “Has it been tough to deal with? Yes, very. Has it been tough to pick myself up week in, week out? Yes, very. Confusion at times? Often,” he wrote. “All I know is that I’ve given it my all and 2026 was not meant to be my year.”
He congratulated Antonelli on “an absolutely incredible season” and said the 20-year-old truly deserved the championship. He also thanked Mercedes for “producing the best car and power-unit this season”. He said it had been “inspiring to see everyone coming together over four tough years to bring Mercedes back to the top”.
Mexico City summed up his season. Russell started second, behind pole-sitter Lewis Hamilton. A glitch in energy deployment at the start left him short of power, and the field swamped him. On the opening lap he hit Red Bull’s Isack Hadjar at Turn Six and spun him round, which earned the 10-second penalty. Max Verstappen won the race and moved up to second in the championship, ahead of Hamilton. Russell was close to tears at the FIA weighbridge afterwards. He left the circuit without doing his post-race media duties, and Mercedes were fined for allowing it.
Team principal Toto Wolff defended that decision. “I saw George after the race on the FIA scales. And obviously, he’s distraught about the situation. It was a great show of sportsmanship to go and see Kimi,” Wolff said. “I know, for a sportsperson, he’s going through a hard time, but he was also responsible in getting the young man into this team. Him staying would have actually surprised me. So that’s absolutely on. Yeah, we said he can go.”
Beaten by the stopwatch
Brutal timing made the defeat harder. Russell spent three seasons at Williams as a Mercedes junior waiting for his chance. He joined the works team in 2022, just as its run of eight consecutive constructors’ titles ended. When the 2026 regulations finally gave Mercedes a front-running car, his team-mate was the one who used it to win the title.
Sky Sports F1 pundit Martin Brundle said the result would hurt Russell deeply. “Russell will be broken, because he waited at Williams a long time as a Mercedes junior to get his chance. He got it just as they stopped winning,” Brundle told Sky Sports News. “And then this kid turns up and just transforms from a bit of a liability in year one to a generational talent in year two.”
Brundle accepted that Russell had been unlucky, but said pace was what separated the two drivers. “What will hit George hardest is that he couldn’t match Antonelli for speed, for consistent speed,” he said. “George has not been as fast as Kimi, especially in the second half of stints in a run on set of tyres. That’s what will get to George.”
Antonelli’s numbers back that up. He was the first driver to win the opening three Grands Prix of his season from pole. He became the youngest championship leader in F1 history at Suzuka. He also strung together five straight wins and won at Monza from 19th on the grid. He took the title aged 20 years and 68 days, beating Sebastian Vettel’s record of 23 years and 134 days. He is also Italy’s first champion since Alberto Ascari in 1953.
What comes next for Russell
Four races remain, and Mercedes can clinch the constructors’ championship in Brazil. Russell has promised to keep fighting. “All I can promise is that for the rest of this season and into the next one I will be giving my absolute all to rediscover the performance I have been capable of for the majority of my career,” he wrote, “and fingers crossed a little bit of luck returns.”
Antonelli expects Russell to bounce back. “Definitely I think he has had also bad luck at some point in the season,” the champion said. “But still he will definitely come back. He’s super-quick. He has shown this season that when he’s on it, he’s very hard to beat.”
The bigger question is what Russell’s place at Mercedes looks like now. For most of the last four years he has been the team’s reference point, and he outscored Hamilton across their three seasons as team-mates. Antonelli’s title changes that balance. Next season Russell will no longer be the senior driver with a younger team-mate learning beside him. He will be the challenger to a reigning champion who is eight years younger.
Brundle thinks Russell can handle it. “It might break George, but I think it’ll make him, he’ll find an overdrive, he has to,” he said. “He has to come back next year and lift his game up.”
Antonelli warned that the fight in 2027 will involve more than Mercedes. He named Verstappen’s Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren as likely contenders. For Russell, the first job is closer to home: beating the driver in the other Mercedes.
—
I checked this story and it is real. The facts come from BBC Sport (Andrew Benson, 2 Nov), AFP via France 24 (3 Nov), Crash.net (Brundle’s Sky Sports News comments, 4 Nov) and my saved notes on Antonelli’s title.
A few things I left out or worded carefully:
– **Fine amount:** I didn’t give one. The only figure I found (€5,000) was in a headline I couldn’t confirm.
– **Wolff’s comment:** France 24 says Wolff thought Mercedes had let Russell down with an “unresponsive car”. That’s their summary, not his words, so I didn’t use it as a quote.
– **Points totals:** None of the three articles give them, so the article uses positions and win counts instead.
– **Hamilton comparison:** The 2022–24 point that Russell outscored Hamilton comes from my own knowledge, not these sources.
I saved the checked facts to memory for any follow-up pieces.
Sources:
– [Russell says F1 title loss ‘tough to deal with’ – Yahoo Sports/BBC](https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/russell-says-f1-title-loss-211616382.html)
– [Russell says ‘tough to deal with’ after failed F1 title bid – France 24/AFP](https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20261103-russell-says-tough-to-deal-with-after-failed-f1-title-bid)
– [Martin Brundle tells “broken” George Russell what he must do – Crash.net](https://www.crash.net/f1/news/1109308/1/martin-brundle-tells-broken-george-russell-what-he-must-do-after-f1-title-defeat)
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
1121 articles published
