Mercedes driver George Russell suggested modern Formula 1 has just become “a race to Turn 1” following a drab U.S. Grand Prix.
What had promised to be an epic race at the Circuit of the Americas turned into one featuring limited overtaking across the field.
Max Verstappen’s victory was the 13th time out of this year’s 19 races the driver starting on pole won the race. Russell had started fifth and ended sixth, having lost a place to McLaren’s Oscar Piastri at the start.
“Right now in F1 it’s a race to Turn 1,” Russell told Sky Sports F1. “There’s no tyre degradation, there’s only three tenths between the quickest car and the slowest car in the top six.
“Normally, you need at least half a second to overtake, so if I came out of Turn 1 in P3, I’d have been on the podium today. But instead I came out in P6 and I finished P6.”
McLaren’s Lando Norris provided some overtaking in his fight with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, although the fact both were on very different tyre strategies helped that be the case.
F1 has long struggled to find a solution for great wheel-to-wheel racing. The Drag Reduction System (DRS) is being replaced under next year’s rule change but has previously been likened to a band-aid for deeper problems, largely rooted in how difficult it is for modern F1 cars to follow each other.
Long-time F1 tyre supplier Pirelli has often shouldered a lot of blame for the state of its tyres but Russell explained that it’s unfair to simply focus on that area.
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“Pirelli get a hard time, no matter what,” Russell said. “[When] there’s lots of tyre degradation, people say it’s not real, the drivers can’t push when we have to manage … [then] we don’t like that when there’s no tyre degradation, we say it’s a boring race.
“They don’t seem to be able to win in any case, so realistically you want a tyre that you can push full gas, but it doesn’t go the whole race If you could choose the tyre, it’s a tyre you can go flat out, but after 15 laps it falls off a cliff and you have to do a two or three-stop race.
“Ideally, the soft tyre does 12 laps, the medium tyre does 15 laps and the hard tyre does 20 laps and then it falls off the cliff. But that is a lot easier said than done.
“Pirelli get a very hard time, they do their best, they have given us a substantially better tyre, like this tyre is very good, but it causes bad racing.”
