Russell confident Mercedes won’t ‘fall into same trap’ that caused Brazil slump

Mercedes endured a dismal performance last time out in Brazil as Lewis Hamilton finished eighth, while Russell retired when running outside of the points.

Ahead of this weekend’s race in Las Vegas, Toto Wolff insisted Mercedes now understand the mistakes that caused what he described as being his worst weekend in his 13 years in F1.

While Wolff stopped short of providing the exact reason behind Mercedes’ slump, the team inferred that a set-up mistake exacerbated their excessive tyre wear and pace struggles. 

“We definitely have some answers, and we’ve got a number of things that we can put down to our poor performance,” Russell told F1TV. 

“But this is the nature of a Sprint race weekend. If you get it right, you’re on a good course and you’re in for a successful weekend, but if you get it wrong, you’ve got no opportunity to make amends.

“We were kind of trapped within our mistake, so that was a gruelling weekend. It shows how sensitive everything is, but we’re confident we’re not going to fall into that same trap, especially this weekend.”

Hamilton provided a similar assessment to his teammate, with the seven-time world champion explaining: “We just got the car in the wrong place. 

“There is potential in the car, we had two really great races before, we just had it in the wrong window – that’s on all of us. We’ve learned from it and experiences like that. You learn more with a loss. 

“It’s painful for everybody, but everybody’s recovered, everyone’s massively motivated to finish off strong this season and I have no doubt that we can.”

Pushed on whether the team understand why the car was in the wrong set-up window in Brazil, Hamilton responded: “Yeah, we know exactly what it was. I knew exactly what it was already.”