Toto Wolff reveals problem behind George Russell's Singapore GP recovery

Climbing from 19th to ninth on a street circuit sounds like a decent Sunday's work, and for George Russell it was. It also fell short of what Mercedes had pencilled in, and Toto Wolff has now laid out why.

Wolff's argument is that Marina Bay punishes anyone who gets close to the car ahead.

"I think it's so difficult here to overtake. The moment you catch the car in front, you have such a wake, so much dirty air that you lose downforce, and I think at that stage he was probably one and a half seconds faster than the guys in front of him, but you can't pass.

"So our best case scenario was P7. If it would have gone smoothly, I think you know P9 we need to be happy with that. It was a damage limitation race for us with him starting from the back and then so far I think he drove a great race."

Photo by: Clive Rose / Formula 1 via Getty Images

He also noted, with a bit of dry humour, that the fight through the field "gave them good TV coverage, no?"

Russell, commenting on his performance, said:

"First stint made good progress. Second stint, Nico [Hulkenberg] did a good job defending. Pretty much challenging, but yeah, not much more to say."

He could have been boosted by a pitstop under the VSC; however, he faced yet more bad luck as the VSC ended as he was on the pit entry.

"Yeah, I mean 10 seconds more... five, 10, 20 seconds more it would have helped the picture, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over that," he said. "I think the main thing for us as a team is to try and understand how we're going to find more performance, because the performance of Red Bull has been very impressive the last three weeks on three very different circuits."

Russell went into the Sunday with a 60-place grid penalty after a power unit failure forced him out of the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia. The replacement of multiple power-unit components, plus the Energy Store and the Control Electronics Unit, resulted in the massive penalty that the Briton was plagued with.

Fernando Alonso, Lance Stroll and Isack Hadjar started in the pitlane, leaving Russell starting P19 on the grid.

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