© Wolfgang Wilhelm for Daimler AG
George Russell looks back at his crash with Valtteri Bottas at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix and says “you should never crash with a team-mate”.
Russell is referencing the fact that he, as a Mercedes junior driver, can look at Mercedes drivers as his “team-mates of sorts”, and as such should be more careful when racing them.
The comment comes after a violent crash with Valtteri Bottas that Russell first blamed on the Finn, but later admitted that it was “probably” not Valtteri’s fault. He later publicly apologized for his conduct after the crash, which included him ‘tapping’ Bottas’ helmet in frustration.
The statement also comes after Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff blasted him saying:
“George should have never launched into this manoeuvre, considering that the track was drying up. It meant taking risks, and the other car is a Mercedes in front of him.
“In any driver’s development, for a young driver, you must never lose this global perspective. So yeah, lots to learn for him I guess, concluded Wolff.
“You need to see that there is a Mercedes and it is wet, it bears a certain risk to overtake,” the Austrian concluded.
With Russell hoping to drive for Mercedes in the future, there’s no doubt that he took Wolff’s words seriously. In an interview with Channel 4 Russell reflected on the lessons he learned from the incident.
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“There’s a lot of things I’ve taken away from it,” said the Briton.
“I think firstly, as a racing driver, one of the rules is that you should never crash with a team-mate.
“For me personally, obviously Valtteri is in a different car but I’m a Mercedes-backed driver, I’m in this position because of Mercedes, and Lewis [Hamilton] and Valtteri are team-mates to me of sorts. I think that’s one thing that didn’t go through my mind in the heat of the moment.
“Secondly, as the stewards deemed it, it was a racing incident, it was unfortunate, but I was just disappointed in myself with how I reacted afterwards. I felt like that wasn’t me.
“I went against my own instincts to walk away from the incident because I wanted to show a bit of emotion. To be honest, my emotions were incredibly high having just crashed at 200mph. So many things ran through my mind.
“It isn’t going to change my racing approach when I’m racing against competitors. If I see an opportunity, if I see a gap, I’m going to go for it. But definitely I’ve learned I need to handle things differently afterwards.
“I really need to take the full picture in before giving a rash judgement to the situation, which is what I did and hence why I felt it was important to put an apology out there for the people I felt like I let down with those actions after the race,” concluded Russell.
You can hear what Russell had to say in the video below.
Big learnings and big words from @GeorgeRussell63 on his crash with @ValtteriBottas at Imola.
🙏 @WilliamsRacing | Forza Portugal!#PortugueseGP🇵🇹 #F1 #C4F1 pic.twitter.com/AdStKQlsqs— Channel 4 F1® (@C4F1) April 28, 2021
