George Russell started sixth at the Circuit of the Americas on Sunday and spent the race fighting a problem Mercedes could not solve inside its own garage. His teammate Kimi Antonelli was out at the front, winning by 13 seconds from Charles Leclerc. Russell was stuck in the midfield, unable to pass Oscar Piastri’s McLaren for long stretches of the second stint, and dropped out of the top seven after a trip across the Turn 12 run-off on the opening lap.

The stewards decided the trip had cost Piastri a place. The standard sanction for leaving the track and gaining a lasting advantage is ten seconds; they halved it to five, citing two mitigating factors.

“The driver of Car 63 had previously been pressuring Car 6 and that put Car 81 into an attacking position (and therefore Car 63 into a defending position). Further, this was a first lap incident,” the FIA wrote in its decision.

‘The least of my worries’

Russell was not placated. Speaking after the race, he called the sanction unjustified but refused to let it carry the headline.

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“The penalty was a bit ridiculous as well, but that was the least of my worries after such a bad weekend,” Russell told reporters.

His bigger complaint was pace. Russell did a short burst on hard tyres that matched Antonelli’s rhythm before he reached Piastri and could not get past, and he put the number of good laps in his race in single figures.

“The pace wasn’t good in the first stint, and when I came out of the pits on the hards, I probably did six laps on the same pace as Kimi,” he said. “But then I caught up to Oscar, and I just couldn’t overtake, so six good laps, 50 bad laps.”

Antonelli on the brink of the title

The result moved the championship almost beyond reach. Antonelli now leads Russell by 123 points and Lewis Hamilton by 124, with 125 points left to win across the five remaining rounds. He can wrap up the drivers’ title at the Mexico City Grand Prix on 1 November if he scores heavily enough that neither Russell nor Hamilton can mathematically catch him over the four races that follow.

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“For me, as long as we win the Constructors’, that’s the main thing for the team. Obviously I’d like to finish best of the rest, but P2, P3, P5 is not champion, so it doesn’t mean anything.”

A Mercedes car with a narrow window

Russell has spent recent weekends arguing that the upgraded W17 only works inside a very specific set-up range. He said again on Sunday that he had no clear read on why his first stint was so slow when Antonelli, in the same car, was pulling clear of the field.

Mercedes carries that question to Mexico City, where the next round goes green on 1 November.

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