George Russell says he won the Las Vegas GP with an “exceptional” opening stint having started from pole position.
On a day dominated by tyres the Mercedes driver opened up a lead and was able to stop later than his main rivals.
He stayed in front throughout, and was able to maintain an advantage over team mate Lewis Hamilton in the closing laps to secure his third career win.
“It’s been a real surprise seeing how strong our pace has been, and securing the pole yesterday I was so pleased with,” he said. “And then I think we won the race in stint one. To be honest, stint one was exceptional. And I knew from there on in the only way we would probably lose the victory is if I grained the tyres, and opened them up. So it was just a case of managing my pace, managing in the right corners and bringing it home.”
Although Russell had said on Friday that he couldn’t explain the car’s pace in Las Vegas, having completed a race distance he believes that the answer lay in the smooth surface. That allowed the team to run the car lower than at some other venues.
“It’s no secret that we struggle on the bumpy circuits and we have to lift the car quite a lot,” he said. “We’ve got to make it much softer. And then we’re in a downforce window where we don’t have any. And it’s not that we just suddenly forget how to set the car up. It’s just certain circuits require us to put the car in a window it doesn’t like to be. And on tracks like this where it’s relatively smooth, we can get the car quite low, quite stiff, with little or no bumps around the track, we fly.”
Russell is confident that the team will also be strong at the upcoming event in Doha.
“I think we’ve got a good shot in Qatar, to be honest,” he said. “Going into this triple header, I had my sights set on Qatar, even to the point that I wanted to take my freshest engine out and put an old engine in for Vegas, to save my best engine for Qatar. And I’m kind of glad we didn’t do that now.”
