Could mixed fortunes for F1's leading Brits turn around at Silverstone?

Formula 1’s return to Silverstone for the 2022 British Grand Prix this weekend will be the latest sell-out event, with the championship currently riding a huge wave of interest. That will feel familiar for those who also attended the 2021 race, which was the first fully open event since the pandemic had forced the long run of races held behind closed or only partially opened doors. This weekend will feature another festival atmosphere, while the paddock itself, a ghost town under the COVID clampdowns, will finally be bustling with activity again. 

On the track, though, things are very different in 2022. The new cars have succeeded in making F1 racing closer and less predictable. Red Bull and Max Verstappen arrive once again with a healthy points lead, but this time the title battle is against Ferrari and Charles Leclerc.  

Of the home heroes, Mercedes’ problematic W13 means Lewis Hamilton is travelling to Silverstone outside a title fight for the first time in nearly a decade, and points-wise he trails his new team-mate George Russell. Lando Norris continues to lead the line for McLaren, but the British team has likewise had a tough start to F1’s new era.

A lot has changed in a year, and here we assess how 2022 has been going so far for Russell, Hamilton and Norris, and explain what they might achieve in front of that packed home crowd. 

George Russell

Russell took the third podium of his 2022 campaign in Baku

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

Age: 24
Silverstone GP starts: 4
Best Silverstone GP finish: 12th
2022 championship pos: 4th (111 points)

You’ve always known you can do it. It’s a dream moment. The chance hasn’t arrived before – not that that was your fault. A previous golden opportunity for Formula 1 success was blown – again, not that that was your fault. But here it is: the reigning world champion is bearing down with a much faster, if hobbled, car, wanting the race lead. How do you react?

For George Russell in May’s Spanish Grand Prix, the answer was ‘magnificently’. He defied Max Verstappen’s attentions for 16 laps until the Dutchman was forced onto a different strategy, which included a sensational side-by-side scrap through Barcelona’s opening three corners, exiting the last with a move that prompted Red Bull (non-ironically) to question Russell’s aggression level against its famously ruthless world champion.

“I’ve also known Max for a long time,” smiles Russell. “I know what he’s capable of. And, yeah, certainly I enjoyed that one-on-one battle.” 

A glance at the season statistics won’t record that moment. But they show that the Spanish race ended up being the second of three podiums (all third places) Russell has taken so far in his first season for Mercedes. 

A Mercedes fiercely fighting a Red Bull for the lead of a grand prix. That’s the dream Russell signed up for, but it was something of a mirage at Barcelona, and Verstappen’s strategy change paid off, with Sergio Perez getting past the Briton too. The W13 has been badly off Red Bull’s and Ferrari’s leading pace so far in 2022, although Lewis Hamilton and Toto Wolff are confident that its porpoising issues are now being fully addressed. This is why Russell, coming across ever wiser beyond his years, says his first Mercedes campaign “has been as a team, like we are underperforming”.

The W13 may have major pace problems, but Russell, in a side-by-side battle, now feels "like I can hold my own and throw it down the inside or throw it on the outside"

“Every single person here is a winner,” he adds. “And they’ve got their sights set on the top step of the podium. And, at the moment, we haven’t had a chance to achieve that. So, work to do.”

A good thing, then, that Russell is “here for the long haul” with the team. But while the first results of Mercedes’ latest car upgrades will be seen at Silverstone this weekend, the 24-year-old can at least reflect that his start to life with the squad he signed for as a junior in 2017 has been seriously impressive. In addition to his three podiums, he leads Hamilton in the drivers’ standings by two places and 34 points. He leads their qualifying battle 5-4 – against a driver with 35 more poles than any other. In Autosport’s driver ratings he’s currently joint-top with Verstappen.

Russell expertly repelled the DRS-troubled Verstappen in Spain

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“You always dream of standing on a podium, standing on the top step of the podium,” Russell says of how he felt about finally making his first such visit in F1 (remembering his lost 2020 Sakhir GP win) with third in Australia.

“But I’m here to win races and win championships. And the feeling of qualifying second with Williams at Spa last year probably outweighed the feeling of standing P3 on the podium in Australia because I did certainly inherit that result slightly with the DNF from Max. Whereas, with the Williams, that was true performance that far exceeded everybody’s expectations.”

But while few could have predicted it would be Mercedes that so badly got things wrong at the start of F1’s new ground-effect era, there was no guarantee that Russell would start things off in silver and black so well against Hamilton. After all, only Jenson Button in 2011 and Nico Rosberg in 2016 have beaten the seven-time world champion in the same car over the course of a campaign.

There are 12 races left including this weekend’s GP on home soil for Russell and Hamilton, but the younger man has already made a nickname-changing impression at his new F1 home. Even so, his qualifying record proves that ‘Mr Saturday’ still lies beneath ‘Mr Consistency’ and that run of nine consecutive top-five finishes.

There have been down moments for Russell this year, mainly in qualifying. At the season opener in Bahrain he pushed too hard on his final out-lap, paid the price with a lack of traction, and so started in ninth, but recovered to run behind Hamilton’s surprise first podium of 2022. And last time out in Canada, Russell’s choice to try slicks in the drying Q3 session backfired, forcing another recovery drive.

He has also had the main share of good fortune between the pair with virtual and real safety car activation timings too. But a driver can only play the circumstances before them. For Russell, as one of four Grand Prix Drivers’ Association directors since 2021, this year has also meant representing F1 driver views on the Jeddah missile attack, the FIA’s jewellery clampdown and porpoising. “There’s quite a lot going on,” he reflects. “But all good.” 

Russell heads to Silverstone knowing he can be in contention for an eyecatching result in front of his home fans. He took a Williams to Q3 last year, raising one of the loudest cheers of the weekend, but had “an incredibly sensitive car that I didn’t have the faith to attack with because I felt like I’d crash if I went any harder”. The W13 may have major pace problems, but Russell, in a side-by-side battle, now feels “like I can hold my own and throw it down the inside or throw it on the outside”.

How loud the cheers will be this Sunday if he can replicate his Verstappen-defying form once again…  

Lewis Hamilton

Hamilton has borne the brunt of conducting 'experiments' in practice to troubleshoot the W13, but scored a podium in Montreal

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Age: 37
Silverstone GP starts: 16
Silverstone GP wins: 8
2022 championship pos: 6th (77 points)

“Silverstone – it’s such an important race for Mercedes and for me and so I really hope that… I just want to be in a battle with these guys.” 

Lewis Hamilton did not expect to share a podium with Max Verstappen and Carlos Sainz at the 2022 Canadian Grand Prix, even though it’s an event he has won seven times. That rather neatly sums up how differently things stand for the seven-time champion heading into his 17th home grand prix (including 2020’s 70th Anniversary GP). Not since the few fallow years of his McLaren stint has Hamilton not been a contender for the win at Silverstone. 

The reason why has been much discussed: the first Mercedes of the new ground-effect era is performing well below expectations due to its severe porpoising problems, the full extent of which only became clear
at the final pre-season test in Bahrain. Toto Wolff himself has called the W13 a “shitbox”, in trying to assuage Hamilton’s discomfort after the Azerbaijan GP earlier this month on the bumpy Baku track. 

Hamilton has scored two third-place finishes so far this campaign, both of which came in events where Red Bull (and in the latter case Ferrari too) suffered or were recovering from reliability problems. To this point in the season, if all four Red Bull and Ferrari drivers finish a race, the podium places are generally locked out of Mercedes’ reach. 

"With these cars that we have today, if you look at Barcelona, we had bouncing in the high-speed corners, so it might not be spectacular [for Mercedes, pace-wise]. But I’m hoping by then we may have fixed it" Lewis Hamilton

But there is hope in the air. Wolff said after the Montreal event just gone, where his team’s in-race pace was strong, that Mercedes has “solved” its end-of-straight porpoising. But that’s only one of the issues. Closely related is what the team describes as ‘hopping’ in fast corners – essentially, the car striking the ground as the downforce is packed on at high speed and top loads, unsettling its progress. And then, with the fix to reduce porpoising meaning the car is running stiffer and lower than before, any surface bumps are keenly felt.

“So, I don’t know how it’s going to be through Copse and all those places,” Hamilton says. “Silverstone is still one of the best circuits, if not the best, in the sense of having all the medium and high-speed corners – and the high-speed corners are always the most fun to drive. With these cars that we have today, if you look at Barcelona, we had bouncing in the high-speed corners, so it might not be spectacular [for Mercedes, pace-wise]. But I’m hoping by then we may have fixed it.”  

Hamilton’s 2022 results so far compared to 2021 are stark: 12 months ago, he was arriving at Silverstone on the back of three wins and two poles. But he did face a 32-point gap to Verstappen. That closed to eight after their infamous Copse clash in the GP, having grown to 33 (the biggest difference between the two fierce title rivals all year) after the Dutchman’s narrow win in F1’s first sprint race.

Hamilton will need a big improvement from his car to challenge for a ninth British GP win

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

But the toxic fallout from those events slightly obscured a very significant moment of the campaign: that Mercedes’ upgrades to its floor and bargeboards closed the pace gap to Red Bull, and never again in 2021 would one team win as many races in succession as Red Bull had done before Silverstone.  And that’s important to remember, because Mercedes is planning to introduce its latest round of updates this coming weekend.

PLUS: What to expect from Mercedes as F1 returns to Silverstone

“We will be trying to push the car forward,” technical director Mike Elliott said after Montreal. “Trying to get some pace from the car we’ve got, or from the package we’ve got, as well as the new bits we are going to add to it.” 

Mercedes is downplaying expectations for these upgrades, as you’d expect from such a well drilled squad, and there is also an important warning for it to consider: that the new parts will need to be fitted and evaluated during practice sessions. This risks compromising Mercedes’ Silverstone weekend overall if they don’t work as expected or require long set-up work to get the car balance where the drivers want it, in what can be a confidence-sapping process behind the wheel. 

This has been a major theme of Hamilton’s season so far, and one that perhaps flatters Russell’s current position ahead of his illustrious team-mate in the championship standings and podium count. Hamilton is the vastly more experienced driver, well in sync with his engineers, and Mercedes has leaned on him to conduct the majority of the set-up “experiments” he joked after the Canada race Russell could be tasked with assessing for the rest of the season.

After all, Hamilton says that when Mercedes’ ideas have backfired, it “really does hinder you through the weekend”. For the rest of the year, he says, “I think we’ll be a little bit more cautious on doing too many experiments”, no doubt without compromising the need to fully test Mercedes’ coming upgrades. 

But 2021 was just the latest example of Mercedes fixing a problem it had not expected or not thought would be so severe (as was the case with the floor rule changes last year). Therefore, the work completed at Hamilton’s and Russell’s home race could have a major impact on the rest of their first season as team-mates. 

Whatever happens, Hamilton – judging what he has felt and seen of racing in the ground-effect cars so far this year – is hopeful that they will at least produce good entertainment for the crowd, even if Mercedes is fighting in the pack and not leading it.

“For all of us it’s going to be amazing,” he concludes. “We also can follow a little bit closer this year. So hopefully the race will be better.”

Lando Norris

McLaren's progress has plateaued somewhat in 2022, limiting Norris to a single podium visit so far

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Age: 22
Silverstone GP starts: 4
Best Silverstone GP finish: 4th
2022 championship pos: 7th (50 points)

He’s likeable, engaging, willing to do whatever it is that James Corden calls ‘comedy’, and unpretentious enough to haul around a motorhome sofa to facilitate an interview. But Formula 1 has already learned something new about Lando Norris in the opening third of the 2022 season: the McLaren ace is extremely tough.  

All elite sports stars have an inherent resilience. But it’s rather rare for the public to witness a seriously impressive sporting display from someone battling a debilitating illness. This was Norris’s 2022 Spanish Grand Prix weekend challenge – to complete the event, where temperatures reached 37C, while suffering from tonsillitis.  

“I would say quite confidently, Barcelona was the toughest race of my life,” reflects Norris. “I just didn’t eat for three days. I couldn’t drink for three days. I struggled so much. Maybe it sounds easy and whatever, and people say I’m overexaggerating, but I was in a very bad way at that point, especially Sunday night. The morning of Sunday, I didn’t want to race. But I think what always helps is a bit of adrenalin and just being in the car. It’s just my comfortable place – it’s what I love. But I knew how tough it was gonna be.”

McLaren was aware how much its young charge was suffering, and it was agreed that he would only take the race as far as he felt comfortable. Race engineer Will Joseph would get no radio replies to his questions on race pace, strategy and potential car balance changes, so difficult was it for Norris to speak. Instead, he relied on giving steering wheel ‘OK’ button clicks as answers, or an absence of such a response to indicate a negative reaction.  

Silverstone’s famous challenging turns should help McLaren’s package, but Norris remains wary of its straights exposing the car’s current lack of drag/downforce balance

Norris, having initially feared that he wouldn’t be able to brake sufficiently forcefully to apply the required 100 bar of pressure for Barcelona’s first corner, first “just felt slow with everything – I didn’t feel like I could drive fast”. But after making it through the first-lap target he’d set, a lack of searing pace provided a welcome benefit in terms of tyre management in the sweltering heat. He ended up rising from his 11th-place grid spot to finish eighth, extra-impressive considering he’d had to miss several engineering meetings across the weekend.

“I didn’t want to race, but at the same time, I knew like, ‘I just have to go out’,” he explains. “I didn’t want to go and just not try. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t ever be satisfied with myself for doing that. So, at least jumping in and giving it a go, and with the outcome of it all, things turned out to be good.”

The rest of Norris’s 2022 campaign so far has otherwise felt rather familiar. He continues to lead and outshine a known brilliant quantity in Daniel Ricciardo, the Australian’s struggles with corner-entry confidence from 2021 travelling on into the new ground-effect era. Norris has also shown he remains capable of grabbing a glittering result, should the leading teams or drivers stumble, as he did with third place in the Emilia Romagna GP. 

Norris impressed by through the pain barrier to eighth in Spain, despite suffering from tonsillitis

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

“That’s probably my most proud weekend of just how well I drove I think,” he says when considering his season so far. 

But this campaign is one substantially different for McLaren, and therefore Norris too, as they head to their shared home race once again. At this point in 2021, Norris had scored triple the number of podiums he’s taken so far this year, and later on he would go on to seal the best result of his career so far behind Ricciardo at the memorable Monza round. But whereas those scores represented the results of McLaren’s recent rebuilding efforts in the aftermath of the failed Honda era, in 2022 the team’s progress has plateaued.

The MCL36 was hampered by an early brake problem that wasn’t fully fixed until McLaren’s big raft of updates was introduced for the Barcelona weekend, with the team also struggling to get the right drag level balance of “producing that good downforce, but also when you want to be very quick in the straights”, says Norris. This held it back at races such as Miami and Baku, while the Bahrain season opener ended with a shock 14th and 15th after the team had lost Ricciardo for the second pre-season test to COVID. There, its brake issue had reared its head and its momentum from the 2019-21 seasons and a promising first test outing in Spain had stalled.

On the driving side, a minor misjudgement (to be forgiven given his condition at the time!) meant Norris lost a Q3 berth to a track-limits infringement in Spain. And he struggled to make an impact in the Montreal DRS trains, which means he arrives at Silverstone on the back of his joint-worst (with Bahrain) result of the campaign so far.

At least the upcoming layout “always puts a smile on your face”, says Norris, in addition to the fervent home support being “way cool”. Plus, the British race will be what the drivers consider to be the first test of what these new F1 cars can do in properly high-speed, high-downforce-required corners. Silverstone’s famous challenging turns should therefore help McLaren’s package, but Norris remains wary of its straights exposing the car’s current lack of drag/downforce balance. 

“I don’t think we’ve ever been bad there,” he concludes. “It’s certainly been tricky in the past, but it’s never been a bad weekend for us. So, I’m sure we can still aim to get into Q3 and score some good points.”

Norris is confident of shining on home turf with the support of the Silverstone fans

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images