Russell’s rapid rise and fall

Abu Dhabi GP

GEORGE RUSSELL TRAVELLED to the season-ending Middle East triple-header more in hope than in expectation. Williams had provided him with a better car in his 2020 sophomore season than it did for his rookie year, when it invariably wasn’t even able to compete with the next slowest car and his only competition was with his team-mate Robert Kubica. This year he’s at least been able to mix it with the Haas and Alfa Romeo teams – and the feasibility of an over-delivering presence in the Q2 part of the grid is much greater. That and getting his first points on the board have been realistic targets. He’d yet to achieve the latter as we headed into these last three races and that bugged him, for he is a super-competitive individual, very straightforward, very results-orientated. His spinning out behind the Imola safety car when on the verge of doing that was for him a devastating blow.

There had been a worrying bubble of speculation a few weeks earlier that Williams might be looking