Mercedes battling 'unusual' George Russell issue that will last months

Mercedes

Mercedes battling 'unusual' George Russell issue that will last months

George Russell was forced to retire from the Canadian Grand Prix

Sam Cook Digital Journalist

Sports Journalist who has been covering motorsport since 2023

Sunday 31 May 2026 08:57

A key figure within the Mercedes F1 team has suggested that it could take 'several months' to work out the issue which caused George Russell to retire from the Canadian Grand Prix.

After winning the sprint race, Russell was leading the main race too, but had to retire on lap 30 due to an issue with his battery.

Russell pulled his W17 to the side of the track and ended his race prematurely, and he could be seen slamming his fists against his Mercedes in frustration.

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With team-mate and championship rival Kimi Antonelli going on to win the race - his fourth consecutive grand prix victory - it means that there are now 43 points between the pair in the drivers' championship.

But whereas Russell will put that behind him and attempt to get back into the championship fight at next weekend's Monaco GP, Mercedes may well be sweating about problems further down the line for their drivers.

What happened to Russell's car in Canada?

The team are still not sure why Russell's battery gave in, and deputy team principal Bradley Lord has revealed that it could take them a while to find out.

He told the Mercedes Nu Silver Arrows radio show: “It was a sudden sort of kill of the ERS system on the car as he came into turn 8 and then that did a reasonable amount of damage afterwards as well.

“We got the car back and were able to get the module out of it. It had to undergo some unusual safety procedures and then has to be shipped back actually to the UK.

“It will therefore be several months before the hardware gets back and we need to really dig through the data to understand exactly what went wrong and then work out how we try and prevent a repeat on any of the other modules in the future.”

Mercedes technical director James Allison also recently admitted that they still don't know why the problem happened.

“It was an engine kill caused by a failure in the battery which just suffered a catastrophic failure a third of the way into the race,” Allison said in Mercedes' debrief.

“We can see enough at the end of the race that the battery was fairly unhappy with some heat damage and we’ll have to figure out in the coming days and weeks exactly what caused it and put it right.”

Head scratching all round for Mercedes.

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F1 Mercedes George Russell Bradley Lord