Sick, slick, and second: Russell guts out Baku podium as Mercedes readied Bottas
Mercedes very nearly called Valtteri Bottas back into service in Baku. By Friday morning, George Russell’s respiratory illness had left the team weighing up a late switch. By Sunday evening, Russell had dragged a bruising weekend into a polished P2 — the sort of salvage job that makes a team’s debrief room go quiet for a minute.
The first sign it was serious came on Thursday when Mercedes excused Russell from media duties to help him recover. Even then, Toto Wolff admitted the situation was “touch and go” the following morning. “It was George himself that said, ‘I’m not sure I can do it,’” Wolff revealed after the race. “Then every day he grew stronger, and to do a one-and-a-half hour race here in Baku without putting a foot wrong — that was a super-merited P2.”
Russell qualified fifth on Saturday, and when the grand prix settled into its typical Baku rhythm — quick straights, slower brains — he leaned on the oldest trick in the Caspian playbook: stay out of trouble, manage the rubber, wait for the race to come to you. An early shuffle dropped him to sixth, but he refused to burn up his tyres in the traffic, stretched his first stint long, and made the overcut bite. When he finally stopped, he came back out second on the road and never cracked.
“It was about just staying out of trouble,” Russell said in the press conference. “I don’t think we had a spectacular weekend, to be honest. Carlos did an amazing job, and Liam as well yesterday. But the cars we ordinarily fight made mistakes or underperformed, and we picked up the pieces. The cooler temps helped a little bit, too.”
That last line is doing some heavy lifting. Baku’s lower track temperatures often flatter cars that are picky on tyre windows, and Mercedes have been a team that can light up when conditions come to them. Credit to Russell for sniffing that out while nursing a chest that clearly didn’t want to be in an F1 cockpit this week. He even admitted that if this had been Singapore, he’d have stepped aside. “Had it been Singapore, I think I would have called it a day on Friday and probably wouldn’t have done the race,” he said, punctuated by a well-timed cough that told its own story.
Could it have been more? Wolff wouldn’t go full fantasy, but he did offer a tantalising data point. “It’s always a bit optimistic to say he could have given Max a hard time,” he said, “but our first analysis showed we were within a tenth of Max in terms of pure performance. It would have been a race at the front, at least. Whether that’s enough for a win, I don’t know, but the car was good on both tyres and his pace was impressive.”
In the end, the result owed as much to restraint as it did to raw speed. Others tripped over strategy calls and tyres; Russell kept his powder dry, soaked the opening pressure, and hit the window when it mattered. It’s the sort of Baku podium that rarely looks spectacular on a lap chart and yet reads like a masterclass in racecraft if you watched it happen.
As for Bottas, the near-call was real. Mercedes had the Finn on standby as Russell’s condition fluctuated early in the weekend. The fact they didn’t need him is a testament to how quickly things turned for their driver — and how calm the team stayed while those contingency plans were being drawn up in the background. It’s a footnote to the race, but not an insignificant one. You don’t often get to say a podium arrived with a reserve plan still warm.
There’s a steeliness to Russell’s season that days like this underline. Not heroic in a movie sense — just smart, tough, relentlessly tidy. Baku gave him the window; illness tried to slam it shut. He got his hand in anyway and left with 18 points that will look mighty handy when the sums are done later.
In a year where margins at the front are thin and patience is a weapon, this was Mercedes at their most efficient — and Russell at his most valuable.
