{"id":345806,"date":"2025-08-15T06:03:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T06:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/345806\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T06:03:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T06:03:13","slug":"how-george-russell-reset-mentally-to-face-lewis-hamilton-as-mercedes-team-mate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/345806\/","title":{"rendered":"How George Russell reset mentally to face Lewis Hamilton as Mercedes team-mate"},"content":{"rendered":"

George Russell<\/a> has opened up about how he dealt with moving to Mercedes<\/a> to become the team-mate of seven-time Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The British driver signed to drive for Mercedes in 2022 after a three-year stint with Williams<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“It was a huge day because it felt like climbing the ladder. This didn\u2019t feel like one step up. It felt like I took three steps in one go,” the Mercedes driver explained on the Untapped<\/a> podcast. “And over those coming months before I started the season with Mercedes, I was thinking like, I believe in myself. I believe I can beat anybody. But the truth is, you don\u2019t know until you go up against the best ever.<\/p>\n

“And I\u2019m stepping into his team where he\u2019s been for 10 years. Everything\u2019s built around him. I\u2019m coming in. I feel fast. I feel young. I feel healthy and ready to take the fight. But you just don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

“So, I was thinking about how I\u2019m going to deal with this psychologically until one day I had a really good conversation with my psychologist about it – like how I should deal with the pressure of being his team-mate, and concluded that when I walk into the garage, I\u2019m jumping into my race car. I\u2019m putting my helmet on. I\u2019m putting my visor down.<\/p>\n

“It should not matter if my team-mate on the garage next door is a seven-time world champion or if he\u2019s a rookie or if there\u2019s nobody there, because I\u2019m in control of my own destiny. And that\u2019s the approach that I had. This is on me to perform.”<\/p>\n

The 27-year-old added that he had to shift his expectations when comparing his performance to Hamilton’s.<\/p>\n

\"George <\/p>\n

George Russell, Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes<\/p>\n

Photo by: Erik Junius<\/p>\n

“And finally, taking acceptance that if I were to finish ahead of Lewis in a season – I think my stats against previous team-mates were [that] I finished ahead of them 95% of the time – I concluded, well, if I beat Lewis in a season, that\u2019s going to be an amazing achievement. But I\u2019m not going to beat him 95% of the time.<\/p>\n

“So, if I beat him 55% of the time over a year, that\u2019s amazing. But you\u2019ve got to accept 45% of the time, you\u2019re going to be behind him. And that\u2019s totally understandable because you cannot go up against the GOAT and expect to wipe the floor with him.<\/p>\n

“So that was probably the biggest psychological shift I had:\u00a0 accepting that my goal is to beat him over a season, but there will be times that I will be behind him.”<\/p>\n

Russell has since stepped into the role of the lead driver at the Brackley outfit after Hamilton moved to Ferrari<\/a> in 2025. He sits fourth in the drivers’ standings with 172 points and won his fourth career grand prix in Canada.<\/p>\n

In this article<\/p>\n

Be the first to know and subscribe for real-time news email updates on these topics<\/p>\n

Subscribe to news alerts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"George Russell has opened up about how he dealt with moving to Mercedes to become the team-mate of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":345807,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4103],"tags":[4199,112565,707,4200,9824,122723,81867,998,4859,969,79,970,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-345806","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-f1","8":"tag-f1","9":"tag-f1-hungarian-grand-prix-2025","10":"tag-formula-1","11":"tag-formula1","12":"tag-george-russell","13":"tag-how-george-russell-reset-mentally-to-face-lewis-hamilton-as-mercedes-team-mate","14":"tag-hungarian-gp","15":"tag-lewis-hamilton","16":"tag-mercedes","17":"tag-nosyndicate","18":"tag-sports","19":"tag-trendingteam","20":"tag-uk","21":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115031271468743462","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345806\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/345807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}