Red Bull’s last upgrade was a “small step backwards”

Mercedes’ strong performance in recent races was aided by Red Bull taking a step backwards with their car, says George Russell.

After winning seven of the first ten rounds this year, Red Bull haven’t taken a victory in the last four events, all bar one of which Mercedes won. Russell said this is only partly due to the gains his team have made.

“Definitely ourselves and McLaren have moved forward,” said the Austrian Grand Prix winner. “And when you look at the gap to the teams lower down the order, that is definitely very clear.

“Red Bull, I think they’ve made a small step backwards with the upgrade they brought. But I think the upgrade we have been bringing to the car was a bigger step forward than we’ve seen on any other team. So let’s see what the next upgrades bring, and hopefully it’s more of the same.”

Mercedes introduced a new floor for their W15 at the previous round in Spa, but removed it after encountering problems with it during practice on Friday. They will test it again today and Russell expects the team will use it for the race this time.

“I’ll be using it tomorrow morning,” he said. “Lewis will be on the floor from [the race at] Spa, but we see no issues with that. I think we were uncompetitive on Friday in Spa for different reasons.

“This is the challenge when you bring upgrades to the car. There’s thousands of reasons why you may be competitive or you may be uncompetitive. This was one factor, but it wasn’t the factor of the lack of performance on Friday. So 99% will be proceeding with the new updates on both cars this weekend.”

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Although Russell believes the team’s results in the last four races exaggerate the performance of their car, he expects they will be in the hunt for victory over the coming races.

“We’ve got to be setting our sights really high, to be honest, because we were improving drastically in these last couple of races.

“I do think these last three wins in the last four races probably doesn’t perfectly reflect the performance. McLaren have been performing really strong. They were probably slightly more competitive than us in Spa last race. Red Bull are a little bit up and down at the moment, but you can be sure they’ll be competitive too.

“But it reminds me a little bit of my junior days in F3, F2, knowing that if you do a great job, there’s a victory on the cards. And if you don’t, you’ll probably be outside…