Carlos Sainz believes George Russell’s performance on his Mercedes debut proves Formula 1 needs to have more equal cars.
Last weekend, the Briton, who had never made Q3 or scored a point in his first 36 races at Williams, stepped in alongside Valtteri Bottas and was ahead for large parts of the weekend.
The only exception was qualifying, where the Finn was 0.026s quicker, but in the race, Russell got ahead into Turn 1 and dominated out until a tyre mix-up at his second stop followed by a puncture denied him a likely win.
“It just demonstrates what Formula 1 is missing out on, by having cars that are two seconds apart when pretty much the whole grid could be within three-tenths of a second because of the talent there is on the grid,” said Sainz via Crash.net.
“It’s a shame that a guy that is fighting for P15 every weekend, suddenly when you put him in a race-winning car, he’s 20 thousandths off pole.
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“If anything for me, this demonstrates what F1 is missing out from, creating a much more incredible show if you could level the playing field a bit more and allow the driver to make more of a difference.
“At the moment, when you are one second off the pace or two seconds off the pace, you cannot really see the last two tenths from a driver that makes a difference.”
His McLaren teammate Lando Norris agreed, though did suggest the unique Bahrain Outer Circuit may have helped Russell settle quickly.
“We can all drive cars extremely quickly, and maybe it’s just a car that suits George and probably suits a lot of other drivers as well,” he explained.
“If you want to win a championship, you need to be in a Mercedes, so I think a lot of drivers could do something kind of similar and, at some races, bring the fight to Valtteri or bring a fight to Lewis.
“But there’s a lot of traits which Lewis has, like his consistency to be able to be on pole the majority of the weekends and have flawless races without mistakes, those are his impressive traits,” he noted.
“I think if we go to Abu Dhabi maybe you’ll see a slightly different story.
“This is a track with four corners. If there’s a track where maybe it’s a bit easier for a driver to jump into a new car and do something special, it is probably here,” Norris argued.
“So it’ll be interesting to see if George was in the Mercedes next weekend in Abu Dhabi, whether it’ll be the same story and whether he’d be even quicker, or whether he just struggles that little bit more because he doesn’t know the Mercedes like the back of his hand like Valtteri would.”