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Here is the transcript of the post 2026 Australian Grand Prix track interviews and press conference featuring George Russell and Kimi Antonelli!
TRACK INTERVIEWS
(Conducted by Jenson Button)
Q: Congratulations, George, you just won the Australian Grand Prix, but not only that, you’ve also just won the first F1 race of the new era. How are you feeling?
George RUSSELL: Feeling incredible. It was a hell of a fight at the beginning. We knew it was going to be challenging. I got on the grid, I saw my battery level, I had nothing in the tank, made a bad start, and then obviously had some really tight battles with Charles, so I was really glad to cross the finish line. But honestly, thank you so much to the whole team because it’s been a long time coming to have this car beneath us and I’m, yeah, going to start off in a better way.
Q: If you look at the results after the race, if you haven’t watched the race, you’d think, “Oh, Mercedes just had it easy, George just walked away with it.” It wasn’t quite like that, was it? And it was so nice for us as fans to see you guys fighting out there.
GR: I’m glad you guys enjoyed it. It was… We had this suspicion that it was going to be a bit of a yo-yo effect, and as soon as one of us got in front it just felt impossible to hold it. And obviously with this Straight Mode we lose a lot of the front end on the car, so we’re sort of just understeering a lot around these corners. So, I’m sure, you know, we’re going to have to improve that a little bit because it was a bit sketchy. But yeah, made it in one piece and just, yeah, glad to be one-two.
Q: You started the year as you would have hoped, I’m sure, so congratulations.
GR: Thank you.
Q: Kimi, that was a very up-and-down race, but congratulations on coming home P2, one-two for the team. How are you feeling?
Kimi ANTONELLI: Yeah, I mean, it was the best start we could have wished for. Unfortunately, the start was really bad and I lost a lot of pace, I mean a lot of places, and I found myself, you know, that I had to recover. But overall, it was a good race. The pace was very strong, especially at the end, and yeah, just looking forward to next week.
Q: I think every time we watched the screen you were overtaking another car, so it’s nice to see in this new era that there is that opportunity to overtake.
KA: Yeah, I mean, the racing was incredible. The first few laps, you know, with the overtake is so powerful that it can, you know, give a lot of action. So, it was really good fun at the beginning, and yeah, now a bit of rest and looking forward to China.
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PRESS CONFERENCE
Q: Well, George, many congratulations. A hugely impressive weekend from you and Mercedes. What was the most impressive part for you?
GR : I think definitely our race starts were the most impressive part of the weekend! No, I think qualifying was a real surprise to us. I think the pace we saw today and the fight we had with Ferrari was more like what we were expecting and what we had predicted pre-Melbourne and after testing. Qualifying was a real shock, but yeah, Ferrari definitely, yeah, they’re in the mix.
Q: And we saw a great battle with the Ferraris in those opening 15 laps or so. Is it easier to race these cars than it was last year?
GR: There’s definitely more opportunity and you do have to be more strategic. I think on a circuit like this where you have four straights and you’ve got to split… Let’s say you’ve got 100% of battery, you’ve got to split that between four straights. No team is splitting that, you know, 25% per straight. Some teams are doing it more on one straight, some other teams are doing it more on the other, and if you use your Overtake Mode, your boost button, you will pass the driver in one straight and he will then pass back. So it was, yeah, it was dicey for the two of us, but I hope you enjoyed it.
Q: The final one for me, George. This is the first time you’ve led the World Championship. Just how sweet does it feel at the moment?
GR: It just feels like another race win, to be honest. I mean, we’re race one into a very long season. Of course I want to fight for race wins week in, week out, but we’re all here now to fight for a World Championship, and that’s what we’ve been working so hard towards. And if we want to do that, we still need to raise our game because there were a lot of areas today that we underachieved, mainly around the race start, having the battery in the right place, and we were lucky not to come worse off.
Q: Kimi, let’s come to you now. Many congratulations as well. It was a frenetic race for you, especially after the start. Were you always confident that you could fight your way back to the front?
KA: Well, I didn’t really know, to be fair, but obviously the pace of the car was very strong and the pace was strong too. I felt very, very good in the first stint. Then on the Hards, I started to grain very early on and had a bit of a difficult time, but then, you know, at the end the pace came back. But of course, the start was a game changer. It obviously was very stressful because I didn’t have power out of the last corner, so the car was not responding to any inputs and it was very stressful, and then the start was poor, very poor, and I just lost a lot of places and found myself having to chase. But the car was very strong. It was good fun at the end, and yeah, the team did an incredible job because I think the result of today was thanks as well, you know, mainly to the mechanics for the incredible job they did yesterday after FP3. So yeah, definitely it was a good end of the weekend and now we will focus on China.
QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR
Q: (Oliver van Bronswijk – The Roar) A question to all three of you. Lando in the pen described the overtake button as creating “artificial racing”. You all had a good amount of wheel-to-wheel combat. Do you think, or do you like the system, or do you think it was detrimental to some of the racing action?
GR: It’s different, it’s definitely different. But I think the interesting thing with these regs is every track we go to, they’re not always going to be like this. You know, we’re going to Shanghai next where you’ve got one big, long straight, so the majority of drivers will be using their energy on that one straight. You don’t need to divide it up between four like you do here in Melbourne. So, everyone’s very quick to criticise things. You need to give it a shot, you know. We’re 22 drivers. When we’ve had the best cars and the least tyre degradation and when we’ve been happiest, everyone moans the racing’s rubbish. Now drivers aren’t perfectly happy and everyone said it was an amazing race. So, you can’t have it all, and I think we should just give it a chance and see after a few more races.
Q: Kimi, Charles, anything to add?
KA: No, I think in a track like this the overtake was incredibly powerful and you could overtake. It created a lot of action in the first few laps of the race, so I think, you know, on this kind of track there will be a lot of action, in some other track maybe a bit less. But I think today was much better than what we all anticipated, so I think, yeah, as George said, we need to just wait a few more races before actually commenting on this new regulation.
Q: (Michael Butterworth – Xinhua News Agency) George, you mentioned Shanghai briefly just there, and obviously we’ve had people say that Melbourne, for one or two reasons, is a little bit of an outlier. Are you expecting the likes of Shanghai and Suzuka to be more representative of where you measure up relative to everybody else?
GR: I think it’s an outlier in terms of how the battery is deployed across the lap. I don’t think it would necessarily change the order that much, to be honest, but it would just change how we go racing and how much variability there is in the deployment.
Q: (Phil Duncan – PA) To George, just following on from the question about Lando and his comments. Obviously yesterday he said as well that we’ve gone from the best ever cars to drive to the worst. Is that just sour grapes from him because McLaren aren’t where they were and you guys have got a big advantage?
GR: Yeah, well, he’s always… yeah, yeah. I don’t know. If he was winning, I don’t think he’d be saying the same. You know, we weren’t happy with how stiff the cars were last year and the porpoising, and everyone had a bad back and drivers were complaining about that, but McLaren drivers said there was no porpoising even though we watched their car and they were porpoising. So, you know, everyone’s always looking to themselves and we’re all selfish in this regard. The truth is last year we had the same engine as them and McLaren did a better job than us and they beat us. Now McLaren have got the same engine as us, the same as Williams and the same as Alpine, and so far we’ve done a better job than them. So that’s just how the game goes.
Q: (Isabelle Coghill – 4ZZZ) I have a question for all three of you, especially for Kimi. What did we learn from this weekend and what can we bring to Shanghai next week, especially it being a Sprint race? Have we learned anything about the cars, about you as drivers, or as the team?
KA: Well, I think for everyone it was a massive learning. For the first time we went racing, we did the first proper weekend. Of course, you know, we did a lot of testing, but testing is one thing and a race weekend is completely different. Shanghai is going to be important to be straight on point with deployment, with everything, because obviously we get only one practice and then we go into qualifying. But it should be a much more straightforward race in terms of how you deploy the energy. This race was very probably the hardest race to start the season because it’s just so difficult on energy with so many straights one after the other. So yeah, but I think it was a massive learning for us drivers, for the team, also for the team to understand where to push development of the car because, you know, this year the rate of development is going to be massive and it’s going to be important to not put any wrong step because the situation can flip very quickly.
Q: Learnings?
GR: I think having experienced the race today and battling, the only thing I would request from the FIA is that with the Straight Mode, the front wing doesn’t drop as aggressively. When we open Straight Mode we will have lots of understeer, and when I was behind Charles and I was trying to duck out of his slipstream it was like my front wing wasn’t working. So I think from a safety aspect that would make the racing safer, better. I don’t see a downside of doing it.
Source: FIA.com
