Mercedes suffer one of the ‘toughest Fridays’ of the season but Russell hopeful of fighting for pole

Friday saw Mercedes’ new package of upgrades break cover in Malaysia, but the day did not go entirely to plan for the Silver Arrows, with some of their rivals getting out of the blocks faster in both practice sessions.

George Russell was the quicker of the two Mercedes drivers, coming home second in FP1 in an encouraging start for the team, albeit nearly four tenths down on Max Verstappen's benchmark.

But both he and Kimi Antonelli faded down the order in the second session, Russell finishing seventh and the Italian eighth as mistakes on their flying laps proved costly.

And with Verstappen looking quick on both the medium and soft tyre throughout the day, Charles Leclerc topping FP2 and McLaren improving as the afternoon wore on, Russell knows he is up against it if he wants to bag back-to-back pole positions – although he refused to rule himself out of the fight.

“Currently, I think that Verstappen looks very fast, and then the race pace of McLaren looked very quick, but never say never,” was Russell assessment of the competition.

“It was a really cool experience driving this circuit. I've never driven here before. It's really an iconic place, so that was cool.

“But yeah, with these conditions, tyre [degradation] is huge for everybody. And the cars are operating in a very different window. So, I think as a team, we just haven't got the car quite where we need it to be. We need to make some set-up adjustments, because we're a bit off the pace.”

Russell initially ran the medium tyres in FP2 and swapped to the softs for just one flying lap. But after looking quick in the first two sectors, he got wide out of the final corner and missed cutting inside the bollard, meaning he was forced to abort and run through the pit lane instead.

Antonelli also got wide on the soft tyre and lost his lap time to track limits, which contributed to both drivers being slightly out of position in the top 10. While that won’t be a great concern given the circumstances, their tyre wear might be more of a problem, with Russell and his engineer exchanging words in FP1 that indicated the team’s degradation was higher than the likes of Red Bull.

As such, Russell admitted it was hard to assess the impact of their new upgrade package, which includes changes to the floor edge, sidepods and rear diffuser.

“You know, I'm feeling the [extra] downforce in some of the corners, but with this amount of tyre overheating and tyre degradation, that kind of trumps everything. So, we just need to get on top of that overnight, that's more of a set-up rather than the upgrade itself, and go from there.”

Deputy Team Principal Bradley Lord was in agreement about just how tricky the day was for the team, despite their drivers managing 56 laps between them in FP2.

“It's probably been one of our toughest Fridays of the season so far, and the competitive picture looks a lot more like it did, say, in somewhere like Hungary than maybe last weekend in Baku,” Lord admitted.

“The feedback from the drivers has been positive [about the upgrades], they can feel more downforce in the high-speed corners and that sort of thing. We've got make sure that we're running the car where it's now at its happiest with that update and there'll be lots of work this evening to trawl through the data and just make sure we're sort of ticking everything off in the right way.

“Equally, we haven't got any opportunity to revert on the update here this weekend, so you know we've got what we've got and we need to make the most of it.

“The long runs all look very close, probably Verstappen [was the] class of the field in both FP1 and FP2 on the different tyres, but it looks like a very, very close-fought thing just behind him. So, we're right in that mix and with a few improvements we can take a step forward from there.”