Russell: It makes no difference to me who is driving the second car.

      George Russell finished his summer holiday on the Italian Mediterranean and told fans on his social media pages that he has already started training.

      The 2025 season is going pretty well for him — considering the difficulties the entire Mercedes team faces, since the W16 car is still not without flaws, and its strengths mainly show up in cooler weather and on tracks with certain configurations.

      Nevertheless, George has already stood on the podium six times, including winning the Canadian Grand Prix, and sits fourth in the drivers’ standings, trailing Max Verstappen by only 15 points. At the same time he is 63 points ahead of Lewis Hamilton, his former teammate who this year races for Ferrari.

      And it was precisely because of him that he once had to seek help from a psychologist — that was in 2022, when George was about to become a Mercedes driver and race in the same team as Hamilton, by then a seven-time world champion.

      "Before, I always thought I could beat anyone," Russell said while taking part in the Untapped podcast. "But you can only find out whether that’s true when you’re competing against the very best drivers.

      To cope with the pressure, I sought help from a psychologist, and one day I had a long talk with my psychologist — it was specifically about how I should act when I became Lewis’s teammate. And we came to this conclusion: when I walk into the garage I sit in my own car, and for me it makes no difference who is driving the other Mercedes — a seven-time world champion or a rookie."

      That approach worked quite well, and I beat Lewis twice over those three seasons when we raced together at Mercedes. The statistics of my head-to-heads with teammates can definitely be considered quite positive.

      I told myself: if I can beat Lewis in at least one season, that would already be incredibly great. Although when I moved from Williams to the factory Mercedes team, you could say I had to take not one step forward, but three at once..."

      Now George Russell is doing a respectable job as team leader, and his new teammate, the young rookie Kimi Antonelli, has someone to look up to.