Russell walked out of press conference before it ended. Tom Clarkson says he should calm down

George Russell’s frustration is becoming almost tangible. The British driver lost his temper again during the Brazilian weekend when the end of qualifying did not go his way. George seemingly struggled to calm down long after qualifying had finished, leading to a minor incident at the press conference.

On his final attempt, Russell came up behind Alex Albon’s Williams. Albon was also on a flying lap, but the Mercedes driver still closed right up to him. George shouted at his good friend over the radio as though he could hear him.

A misunderstanding then arose with engineer Marcus Dudley, who advised Russell to back off and try again. George duly abandoned his lap, which was faster than his previous effort despite Albon, but the rain then intensified and there was no chance for another lap. Russell was furious, and even Toto Wolff could not calm him down. “George, you’re P2.” the Mercedes boss said over the radio.

But that did nothing to placate George. “P2? I don’t want to be P2, I want to be P1. That was a P1 lap.”

After qualifying, Wolff told reporters that Russell was mistaken and would have finished second — he was dropping five places for an engine change anyway — regardless of whether he had completed the lap. However, numerous data analyses supported Russell’s view. Either way, the incident underlined the frustration that has been radiating from the Mercedes driver in recent weeks.

“He actually walked out of the press conference while it was still going on. He was just done with it. He was done with it,” Tom Clarkson, who hosts the official FIA press conferences and witnessed the whole incident at close quarters, told the F1 Nation podcast.

“I’d asked him a question about that lap that he didn’t complete because he was told not to by his race engineer Marcus Dudley, and when he sort of had enough of answering questions, he just got up and walked out,” Clarkson recalled.

“I just came away thinking, ‘George, you need to chill, because this is going to start eating away at you.’ And then in the race, we all saw what happened,” the veteran journalist added, referring to Russell’s spin at the pit exit.

Russell: I’m really disappointed

Watching the recording of the press conference confirms that it did happen, but only right at the end. F1 TV subscribers can see that when Kimi Antonelli and Lando Norris answered the final questions and got up from the sofa, Russell was already gone, which is certainly very unusual. On the other hand, it cannot be said that he failed to fulfil his media duties.

As it happened, George left immediately after a question about Toto Wolff’s message at the end of qualifying. “For me personally, given the circumstances of last week, it would have meant a lot to me to take pole today. I missed it last week by nine milliseconds, but that was a real surprise. Today, I really felt every lap I was doing, I was top of the leaderboard most laps I completed. So yeah, I’m really, really disappointed with how that panned out,” Russell said.

“When you’re a driver, you’re the one who feels it the most. And, you know, going back to his leadership skills, we have to remember, you know, we collectively made a misjudgement today, and there’s members of my team who are going to be feeling as bad as I am currently. So, you know, it’s important to remember that, and we need to just keep the morale high. It was a very solid performance, and I guess we take the positive from that. But yeah, there’s no point for pole, but it would have just been a nice little one to add to the tally,” said George, who marched out of the press conference after that answer.