George Russell to have a new race engineer for F1 2023 season

Dudley has previously deputised as the race engineer for Lewis Hamilton when Pete ‘Bono’ Bonnington has been absent but will now step into a full-time role guiding Russell.

He is another string to the bow of Russell, who won Mercedes’ only race of 2022 in Brazil and also edged teammate Hamilton in the end-of-year F1 standings.

Dudley acted as the race engineer last season in Austria for Hamilton, when ‘Bono’ was unavailable.

Dudley’s full-time job was as a performance engineer at Mercedes but his role will change this year as he replaces Riccardo Musconi.

Musconi was the voice in Russell’s ear for his debut season at Mercedes. He was previously Valtteri Bottas' race engineer. This year, he will move into a new job at Mercedes.

He will fondly remember being at the centre of the celebrations on the podium in Brazil when Russell won his first-ever F1 race, the team’s highlight of an otherwise bad 2022.

The season-opening F1 Bahrain Grand Prix is days away and Russell will be hoping for more luck than he got during preseason testing, when his defining image was him stood glumly looking at his broken-down W14.