On the other side of the Mercedes garage, George Russell managed to recover from a difficult qualifying – which resulted in him lining up in P17 on the grid – to ultimately end the race in eighth place. This put him one position behind Red Bull’s Sergio Perez, who had also had a tough Saturday and started the race from P16.
“We were hoping for P7, to be honest,” Russell said of his end result. “Checo [Perez] had a really great race, we were a bit surprised by his pace, and on paper we thought we’d be about 50 to 60 seconds behind the leader – we ended up 40 seconds behind the leaders, so we’ll take the very small positives.
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“Happy to see Lewis on the podium, congrats to Oscar as well on his first win.”
While his own weekend was not without its challenges, Russell acknowledged that it was positive to see the Silver Arrows score their fifth consecutive podium of the season at the Hungaroring.
“We can argue that from these five weekends, this [in Hungary] has probably been our least competitive, and obviously Lewis on the podium today which is a great result for the team,” the 26-year-old added.
“Clearly that was… in the normal circumstance of qualifying, we’d have been up there fighting for that P3 to P5 mix. Still disappointed after yesterday, but that’s the sport – you make mistakes, you get punished.”
