George Russell isn’t buying the idea that Mercedes has strolled into 2026 with the answer sheet already filled in.
Yes, the early noise says the W17 looks sharp. Yes, Mercedes has racked up a hefty mileage total in Barcelona’s shakedown — around 500 laps, with Russell and rookie team-mate Kimi Antonelli regularly appearing near the top of the timing screens across the week. And yes, Russell has found himself labelled the pre-season title favourite in some quarters.
But when Russell spoke after those Barcelona days, his message was clear: nobody should be acting like this is Mercedes versus the rest. Not least because the one team everyone expected to wobble early on — Red Bull, now leaning on its own Red Bull Ford Powertrains project — appears to have turned up with something functioning, quick-looking and, crucially, reliable.
That’s the detail that’s landed hardest in the paddock so far. New power unit era, new programmes finding their feet, and yet Russell is already pointing to Red Bull as “very much in the fight” based on what he’s seen in the opening running.
“I mean, I’d love for it to turn out that way, and I do want to go head to head with Max,” Russell said when the conversation turned to him being priced as an early favourite, with Max Verstappen next in line.
The Verstappen mention is doing a lot of work here. There’s been enough history between the two on track that you don’t have to squint to imagine the temperature rising if they’re genuinely swapping blows at the front again. Russell, though, leaned into the idea rather than dancing around it.
“If you’re going to win, you want to have fought for it and won it fair and square on track,” he added.
What’s interesting is how quickly Russell has moved the conversation away from Mercedes’ own strengths and onto the idea that the field might be tighter than expected. The pre-season assumption for months had been familiar: Mercedes thrives when power unit regulations reset, and 2014’s memory still hangs over every technical preview. The talk had drifted towards a likely Mercedes advantage — and, by extension, a potential Mercedes–McLaren fight given Lando Norris’ form last season.
Russell wasn’t dismissive of that anticipation, but he didn’t feed it either.
“I think probably the fans and people were expecting potentially [see] Mercedes versus McLaren, because there was a lot of anticipation that Mercedes would clearly have the best power unit,” he said. “But it seems like the other power unit manufacturers have done a good job.”
And then came the line that should make rivals sit up: the Red Bull power unit programme, in Russell’s eyes, looks far healthier than many expected this early.
“We’ve been quite surprised by what we’ve seen from some of our rivals, especially on the Red Bull power unit side,” he said. “That looks very impressive, considering they’re a completely new outfit and [they are] reliable as well, so kudos to them.”
That’s not the kind of compliment drivers throw around casually in February. Reliability at this point is a quiet form of menace: it means you can actually run your programme, learn the car, push into more aggressive maps and start understanding where the lap time lives, rather than spending days firefighting basic issues.
As for Mercedes itself, Russell’s assessment was upbeat without drifting into victory-lap territory. He leant on a Toto Wolff quote that’s already done the rounds in the team’s own circles — a typically blunt barometer for whether you’ve at least built a sensible baseline car.
“Well, obviously we’ve only driven the car for three days, and it’s still very early days, but quoting Toto, ‘it doesn’t look like it’s a turd’, which is a bonus,” Russell said.
It’s a very Mercedes way of framing it: not claiming you’ve nailed it, just confirming you haven’t made an immediate mess of the fundamentals. Drivers often say you can tell quickly if a car is “born well”, and Russell’s point was that the W17 doesn’t carry the obvious vices that scream crisis. But he also stressed how little that guarantees once proper testing begins and rivals start to show their hands.
“In the early days like this, you know when it could be a really bad car, and you can sort of highlight those negatives early on,” he said. “We don’t believe it is, but is it a car that can produce a world championship? It’s still way too early to see.”
Mercedes’ Barcelona mileage and steady early impression will keep them in the conversation until Bahrain, where the first official pre-season test runs from 11-13 February before a second three-day outing in Sakhir from 18-20 February. That’s when the gamesmanship intensifies, the fuel loads get argued over, and the real work starts: correlating wind tunnel promises with track reality.
For now, Russell has set a tone that sounds less like a man carrying the weight of “favourite” status and more like a driver who’s noticed the pack isn’t waiting politely. If Mercedes is back, it might not be in the way people expected — and if Verstappen really is armed again, Russell seems perfectly happy with what that means for 2026.
