Russell reveals Mercedes are "closer to where we hope to be performance wise"

Following an encouraging day at Barcelona, Mercedes driver George Russell stated that the Brackley-based outfit look to be close to where they had hoped to be performance wise.

Mercedes endured its worst race weekend at Monte Carlo for a long time. George Russell suffered a technical issue in the middle part of qualifying while his team-mate Andrea Kimi Antonelli sustained a crash in Q1.

The two incident left the Maercedes pair line up in P14 and P15 on the grid respectively. From their disappointing starting positions, they were unable to make any real progress on a track where overtaking is nearly impossible.

On the back of their struggles in the Principality, Mercedes completed two successful practice sessions on Friday, displaying great speed on a track where they usually excel.

George Russell' W16 looked nailed through the higher speed corners as he wound up pushing Piastri the closest of anyone in the second one-hour session.

"I felt good in the car today. Barcelona is a great track to race at, so it was a nice feeling being out there and getting a good number of laps on the board. Our qualifying runs looked decent in the second practice session, and it was nice to be closer to where we hope to be performance wise.

"We did a lot of long run work today too and compared to other teams, we weren't quite as competitive as on the single lap. We experimented with some different approaches across our cars though and that gives us plenty of good data to dig through tonight.

"We will also do the usual overnight work and I'm confident that we can take a step forward tomorrow. Let's see what the next two days bring," Russell concluded.