Mercedes Formula 1 driver George Russell says that FIA stewards must “apply common sense when needed” after he was one of several drivers to be penalised for driving offences over the US GP weekend.
Russell was given a five-second penalty in Sunday’s main race for forcing Valtteri Bottas off track during his charge through the field from a pitlane start.
Although the penalty made no difference to his eventual sixth place finish like other drivers and teams the GPDA director was somewhat frustrated by the call.
“I think the stewards have a really difficult job because the regulation is so large,” he said when asked about it by formu1a.uno.
“When you watch an incident in slow motion, or you pause it at a given point – my penalty with Valtteri, the rule states if you’re not ahead of the apex and you push someone wide, you get a penalty.
“So by the letter of the law, my penalty was correct. But anybody who knows racing, and anybody watching it, knows it was not correct.
“I don’t really know how we move forward. I think we’d probably all want to see probably the same stewards all year long, so that the drivers and the stewards can all be on the same page, and that we can apply common sense when needed, rather than having to really follow the letter of the law.”
Russell was obliged to start the race from the pitlane after his crash in Q3 damaged the upgraded floor and other parts on his W15.
With no spare set the team was obliged to work through the night to switch back to the earlier Montreal-spec floor, which meant that Russell dropped out of parc ferme, thus triggering the pitlane start.
He admitted that it wasn’t easy to deal with the impact of his mistake after the effort to bring the new parts to Austin.
“Yeah, really tough,” he said. “You feel as a driver you’re letting the whole team down when your sort of actions have such an impact on so many people, but there’s never any hard feelings.
“We’re all pushing the limits as a team to improve this car and get some big results. And when we are in that window, we’re there, when we’re not, it bites. And that happened to me yesterday. You saw it with Lewis today. He never makes mistakes, and the car just goes on us from nowhere.”
Russell was in the tricky situation of starting the main race having done no laps with the older aero spec.
“I had no idea what to expect going into today,” he admitted. “But clearly the pace was pretty good. I’m still confident that the upgrades were working as expected, and I really think we could have been fighting for probably a podium, if we had been in a normal starting position.
“So I think in the sprint race, I just destroyed my tyres, but clearly in those early laps yesterday, we had the pace, and we’ve shown glimmers of really strong pace this weekend. So let’s see what the coming races bring.”
He added: “I managed to change the setup a bit because of the parc ferme start. Nothing really to do with the upgrades. It’s pretty complicated to understand.”
