George Russell: dialed back, stepped up, and called 2025 his best yet
George Russell doesn’t dress it up. He says 2025 has been his best season in Formula 1 — and, perhaps unexpectedly, credits the years alongside Lewis Hamilton for helping him get there.
“Yeah, I think so,” Russell said when asked if this was his strongest campaign to date. “Definitely my most solid in terms of performance, emotional system, least mistakes.”
The shift didn’t happen by accident. Russell admitted that in the Hamilton years at Mercedes he consciously pushed beyond his own limits, chasing flashes of glory in seasons where consistent podiums felt like table scraps. The mentality delivered some highs, but it also tripped him up.
“During my time with Lewis, I wanted to push myself to see if there’s more in the tank, go beyond the limit and see what happens,” he explained. “In ’23, I wasn’t satisfied just fighting for podiums. I wanted to push the boundaries more, to try and get a highlight result, rather than just settling for a podium or a P4. That kind of bit me a bit.”
When Hamilton left for Ferrari at the end of 2024, Russell moved into the role he’s long been groomed for: Mercedes team leader. The response was measured, not macho. He tightened up, drove within a clearer window, and the results followed — including headline wins in Canada and Singapore that underlined both his pace and a newfound economy of risk.
“I just reined it back a little bit this year,” he said, “and in turn, it probably helped me get bigger results.”
It’s an evolution that fits the arc of his Mercedes stint. Promoted from Williams for 2022, Russell outscored Hamilton that year and did so again in 2024, even as the team wrestled an unpredictable car through a fluctuating rules landscape. The raw speed was always there; 2025 brought the restraint.
The leadership piece has mattered too, partly because of who sits across the garage. Mercedes paired Russell with teenage rookie Kimi Antonelli this season, a big bet for a team that’s used to banking points with two veterans. The youngster flashed pace early, dipped mid-year, then rallied late in a way that impressed the factory enough to lock both drivers in for 2026 — a season that will usher in F1’s new chassis and engine regulations.
“I think it’s always interesting having a new teammate, just to see how they approach things within the team,” Russell said of Antonelli. “He’s a young kid with a lot of energy… and he has a very positive impact on the people in the team, which is great. But obviously in our sport, it always comes down to what you achieve on track. He’s definitely shown signs of real speed. I’m sure, going into next year, he’s going to continue progressing, and you’ll probably see those moments more often.”
If there’s a through-line to Russell’s season, it’s that constraint can be a weapon. Where 2023 often saw him leaning on the edge to conjure something from a car with narrow operating windows, 2025 looked like the product of sharper judgement calls — fewer speculative lunges, cleaner Sundays, more weekends where the execution matched the intent.
None of this dismisses the Hamilton effect. If anything, Russell’s candor acknowledges it. Sharing a garage with a seven-time World Champion tends to put a driver on a knife edge. You either survive that tension or get swallowed by it. Russell chose his season to recalibrate and, with the keys to Mercedes firmly in his hands, made that maturity count.
There are bigger questions looming over Brackley: how competitive the package will be under the 2026 rules, how quickly Antonelli can turn those “moments” into a full season’s worth of points, and whether Russell can keep this cleaner, calmer peak as the technical ground shifts again. But if 2025 was an exam in leadership as much as it was in pace, he passed it with authority.
The best version of George Russell wasn’t the one sending it and hoping. It was the one who knew when to leave something on the table — and still walked away with the trophies that matter.
