"Exhausted" Russell set for Brazilian F1 grid penalty

Mercedes driver George Russell will lose five places on Sunday's Formula 1 Brazilian Grand Prix grid as he takes his sixth internal combustion engine of the season.

Following a brace of power unit related issues earlier this year, the latest arriving after a failure at the Bahrain GP in Malaysia, Russell was always going to require a sixth ICE before the end of the year.

With Lewis Hamilton's spectacular sprint recovery from 20th to fifth in mind, which he pulled off at the 2021 edition with Mercedes, the team felt Interlagos was as good a place as any to take it.

As Russell had already exceeded his initial allowance of four units for the season in Singapore, his additional engine only costs a five-place grid penalty.

"We always had to take a grid penalty at some point between Singapore and the end of the year and we felt like a good place to take it," Russell said on Mercedes' social media channels.

"Obviously, Lewis took a very big penalty here a number of years ago and did pretty well. Five places isn't that bad."

George Russell, Mercedes, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes

Photo by: Simon Galloway / LAT Images via Getty Images

Planned or not, it's Russell's latest setback after a nightmarish 2026 campaign in which he was never able to build up momentum and ended up being outperformed by newly crowned world champion Kimi Antonelli.

Speaking on Thursday, Russell admitted that the number of times he has had to bounce back after a disappointing weekend, of which there were many, had been wearing on him.

"I probably just feel a bit exhausted this season of constantly picking myself back up. When you get kicked to the ground you pick yourself back up, then you get kicked down again, you pick yourself back up. I was hoping to do that maybe twice in the season, not every other weekend," he said with a wry smile.

Russell, who has dropped to fourth in the standings behind Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, always insisted the 2026 power unit regulations punished his natural driving style, having chased his tail across the season to try and adapt. But with the rules reducing the share of electric power next year, amid other tweaks, Russell backed himself to overcome his down year.

"The power unit changes next year. The tyres are changing slightly for next year," he said. "I've had a lot more good years than bad years. I don't think there's a single athlete or just individual in the world that [only] goes through great years every single year.

"It's the way you bounce back from those years to continue having the belief and courage to return to those positive ways, and that mental resilience. What this year has taught me is that I still believe in myself and next year we fight again."