Russell cannot explain the serious crash during the second training session in Mexico

George Russell says he doesn’t understand the reason for his heavy crash in second practice at the Mexican Grand Prix, which resulted in the Mercedes having to be completely rebuilt overnight.

For the second weekend in a row, Russell was involved in a serious accident and had to be cleared from the medical center at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez due to the severity of the impact. He was fastest in the first practice session, but then lost control of the curb in Turn 8 at the start of the second practice and hit the wall at high speed.

“Honestly, I don’t know what happened,” Russell said. “The car started bouncing on the ground and before I could catch it I was spinning around.

“There’s a lot of work ahead for the boys again tonight. It seems like one thing after another is happening at the moment. It’s frustrating. In the first training session we were very strong, very fast. I tried to take the same line, cutting this corner, and for some reason on this occasion in the second training session everything started to worry me.

Despite the crash, Russell believes it was not as costly as usual due to the extended tire testing format in the second practice and hopes to recover in the final practice session on Saturday.

“I mean the second practice… because it was a Pirelli tire test, it wasn’t very valuable in terms of what you learn going into the race weekend,” he said. “Obviously I missed laps. FP3 will be important; I just hope we can fix the car.

Teammate Lewis Hamilton also didn’t have a normal start to the weekend, with Kimi Antonelli replacing him in FP1 and then tire testing taking over in FP2, but he’s seeing some encouraging signs with his completed runs.

“It’s a tire test so we couldn’t change anything on the car – it was the same from start to finish,” Hamilton said. “I know what we need to fix. We’ll see if we actually succeed. But I didn’t think it was terrible; a bit ahead, guys. I have some work to do today.