“[I’m] just surprised by the lack of pace, really don’t know where that disappeared to,” he reflected later on. “Friday was good, Saturday was reasonable and looked on course for sort of a comfortable fourth or third prior to the race, and suddenly [we] just went backwards and I don’t really know what happened.”
Quizzed on how much the result had hurt following on from Mercedes’ positive momentum of late, Russell responded: “Yeah, it really does. First off weekend for us since the upgrades, but I’m not too concerned – if you take the last seven races, we’ve been really strong in six of them.
“We’ve been ahead of Ferrari in all of them and suddenly today they looked really competitive. We need to understand what happened as until today we looked on course for a pretty half-decent weekend. As I said, it all went away from us and I don’t know what happened.”