‘In my mind, it’s still a win’ – Russell details factors behind Spa disqualification and shares what Mercedes have learned

George Russell has opened up on the heartache of being disqualified from the Belgian Grand Prix, with the Mercedes driver losing what would have gone down as a third F1 race win due to an underweight car.

Russell beat team mate Lewis Hamilton and McLaren’s Oscar Piastri to the chequered flag in an ultra-close finish at Spa-Francorchamps, having gambled on a one-stop strategy compared to the more conventional two-stop.

READ MORE: Mercedes explain initial findings as to why Russell’s car was underweight in Belgium

However, Russell’s Silver Arrow was found to be under the minimum weight limit during post-race checks, with the stewards subsequently stripping him of the win and Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff stepping in to apologise for the “mistake”.

Asked ahead of this weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix if he’s confident the team now understand exactly what happened and that such a situation won’t occur again, Russell replied: “Yeah, absolutely. Clearly, we didn’t do a good enough job.

“I lost a bit more weight during the race than we thought, the tyres lost a lot more than we expected, the plank was wearing more than we thought as well, so it was sort of these three or four factors all coming together that just pushed us over the edge.”

As for whether Mercedes will be slightly more cautious in these areas as F1 returns to action at Zandvoort, he added: “I don’t think you need to take more margin. I think the processes weren’t quite in place to cover all the different scenarios.

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“I knew before the race that I was a little bit light, but it was too late to make a substantial change without eating a steak or something, which was probably not the best pre-race routine!

“But there are things that now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can do better and we will be doing better moving forward. As always, you need to make a mistake first until you recognise there’s a problem.”

Russell added that he still views the race as a win to go alongside his victories in Brazil in 2022 and Austria earlier this season, while saying it would have felt like “a much bigger blow” had he been in the mix for the title this year.

“Of course, it’s very frustrating that the one time in three years we’ve been just under the weight limit was the race we won, but there’s zero hard feelings,” he commented. “We’re in this together and it will make us stronger for the future.

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“I lost 25 points, but in my mind, that is still a win. I’ve kept my helmet and it’s going to be going on my bedside table with my other two victories. Those celebrations I had with the team in that moment straight after [the race] were some of the best feelings of my career, so I’ll only take positives from what happened.”

Despite Russell’s disqualification, Mercedes head into the second half of the season as one of F1’s in-form teams, having won three of the last four Grands Prix amid a steady flow of improvements to the W15.