Russell believes competitive order ‘can go any way’ after ‘very tight’ Friday running in Mexico City

George Russell shared his confidence that the close competition shown during Friday’s running in Mexico City proved that Qualifying “can go any way”, with the Briton hoping to “pull the lap out when it matters”.

Many teams, including Mercedes, opted to field a rookie in the first hour of practice, which meant that Russell temporarily gave up his seat for reserve driver Fred Vesti.

That put him on the back foot in terms of track time, but he quickly caught up and finished third in FP2 with a time of 1m 17.933s – just 0.003s slower than McLaren’s Lando Norris, and around a tenth adrift of pace-setter Charles Leclerc.

“Always coming to Mexico, [there are] challenges with the altitude,” Russell reflected. “I think one big difference this year is that the majority of teams have been running high downforce at all of the tracks because we’ve got the SM that opens on the rear and the front on all of the straights.

“What that means is usually when we come to Mexico, we go to our maximum downforce from medium or low downforce, whereas this year we’ve always been on our maximum downforce.

“Coming to Mexico, it’s even lower grip than we’re used to. Turbo lag is an issue but it’s very tight out there between the top four teams.

“It’s fair to say Ferrari are looking strongest at the moment. Leclerc didn’t properly finish his lap, I don’t think, and Lewis [Hamilton] had the issue.

“We expected on this sort of circuit for them to perform best – they’ve got a very good chassis – but come Q3, I think it can go any way. As it stands, it can go any way so I need to pull the lap out when it matters.”

Mercedes Deputy Team Principal Bradley Lord echoed Russell’s comments about the unique nature of the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, but similarly anticipated that they have the “potential” to be in the battle for pole position.

“A solid day for us, I’d say – not spectacular, but solid,” Lord explained. “There are a lot of challenges here with PU cooling, with brake cooling, with boost management with these turbos now that we don’t have an MGU-H to help us out with that as we have done for the last few years.

“This is a tricky place to get everything right, to be quick on a single lap but also be able to maintain your pace for the long runs. We’ve answered a few of those questions. We’ve got a bit more digging to do through the data to find exactly the best compromise for tomorrow and Sunday.

“We’re always aiming to be up there fighting for pole, fighting for the front row and the front couple of rows. It looks like we’ve got the potential to do that, and now we’ve got to take the right steps to make sure we can deliver on that potential tomorrow.”