George Russell labelled his Mercedes W13 a "diva" as he admitted the team still finds it difficult to extract the best of its performance.
Mercedes have not been able to secure the results they would have wanted this year, after admitting errors were made during the design process of their 2022 car. They are still comfortably ahead of the midfield, but unable to compete with Red Bull and Ferrari for performance.
As a result, neither Russell nor Lewis Hamilton have tasted victory in a race this year, and that seems unlikely to change with only four rounds to go. They will both start on the second row at the United States Grand Prix, after what looked like a decent qualifying performance.
But, ever the perfectionist, Russell still seemed less than satisfied as he spoke to reporters after the session. "After the start of this weekend, personally, being off the pace this weekend... the start of FP1 was good but then I had a big sideways moment and almost crashed in practice and that sapped a lot of my confidence across all the practice sessions," he said.
"Fortunately from lap one in Q1, I was sort of back to normal ways. Six-tenths off pole is not something to be celebrating, but if you take the season as an average and you look at the length of this lap, it's probably better than the majority of our qualifying sessions."
Drivers are usually able to get past a small mishap in practice, but Russell went on to say that "it's not rare" this year due to the temperamental nature of the car. "It's a bit of a diva at the best of times, so you always want to have a clean weekend," he added.
"You never want to put the car in the wall or anything, and if you ever have a big moment that takes that confidence away, it does take a little while to get back to it. But I think once the helmet's on in qualifying you always have a slightly different mindset and fortunately the car felt back to normal ways in qualifying."
Despite not being able to compete for wins as hoped, Russell's record in his debut year with Mercedes has been impressive. He finished inside the top five in each of the first nine races of the year, and continued the streak after being crashed into at Silverstone.
That consistency put him in a strong position to challenge for second place behind runaway champion Max Verstappen, but his last two results have hampered that bid. Eighth place in Japan followed a scoreless finish in Singapore, leaving Russell 46 points behind Sergio Perez, with Charles Leclerc only one point adrift of the Mexican.
