It’s set to be a weekend of expected announcements in Austin, and Mercedes got the ball rolling first on Wednesday when it confirmed George Russell and Kimi Antonelli as its 2026 driver line-up.
Toto Wolff had insisted that would be the pairing a number of months ago, and that there might not even be an announcement once pen was put to paper. But as the contracts remained unsigned, it became one of the more bizarre loose ends as Formula 1 entered the final seven weeks of its season and one of its top performers still didn’t have a deal.
I was due to sit down with Russell in Azerbaijan, and the focal point was certainly going to be the lack of a contract at that stage. An illness affecting the 27-year-old delayed those plans until Thursday at Circuit of the Americas, and the timing in many ways couldn’t have been better after a second place in Baku and a win in Singapore preceded the contract announcement.
The deal had been deemed a formality long before that, but that was partly due to the fact Russell is managed by Mercedes and any move elsewhere would need sanctioning by his current employers. Yet he insists that was not an axe that was hung over him.
“It’s always going to be mutually beneficial, right?” Russell tells RACER. “For a team to get the most out of their driver, they need the driver to be happy and feel valued and respected, etc, etc. And that’s the same whether you’re a junior driver or managed by the team or not at all.
“That’s why I’m happy, because I think Toto has been beyond fair with his proposal and offer and what we’ve agreed. I’m very happy.
“He could have been substantially harder if he wanted to be – and of course he could have been more generous if he wanted to be – but I am very happy with where we’ve got to.”
Russell admits he played a part in it taking so long for the deal to finally be done, and notes that many observers don’t appreciate just how different each year looks from the last for a driver in terms of their off-track workload. But that doesn’t get away from the fact Mercedes retained the true power in negotiations.
“There’s a lot of off-track things that I wanted to tidy up,” he says. “And this isn’t because I want to spend more time laying on the beach and chilling out. This is because I want to be an even better driver and I want to take myself to the next level.
“The seasons are getting longer and longer, and there’s more commitments. The F1 launch at the start of the year, New York premieres, Monaco premieres, Netflix commitments, all things that are actually separate to all the sponsorship commitments…
“Going into next year, we’re going to need to do more days on the simulator. When you add up the two additional tests, there’s about 12 more days gone from your schedule. So before you know it, it’s like, ‘How am I going to have time to train, be in good shape, be able to recover from the jetlag and X, Y, Z?’
