Former Formula 1 driver David Coulthard says George Russell’s bruising 2026 campaign has become a “character-building” exercise, claiming the Mercedes driver’s current run of bad luck is too unbelievable for a Rocky film.
Russell won the Australian Grand Prix and the Chinese sprint race, but his season has since taken a turn. As F1 enters its August shutdown, the Briton trails his teenage team-mate Kimi Antonelli, who leads the drivers’ standings, by 59 points.
Speaking on the Up To Speed podcast, Coulthard reflected on the first half of Russell’s season. Since his triumph in Melbourne, the 28-year-old has been hit by technical problems in China, an ill-timed safety car in Japan, a string of penalties in Monaco, an engine failure while leading in Canada and power unit issues in Belgium.
Most recently, an anti-stall glitch off the line in Hungary eliminated him from contention before the first corner.
“It’s been a shocker. How much bad luck can one person have?” Coulthard explained.
“On one side, that bad luck is something that the team have to work through. On the other side, George is now not on the crest of a wave. It’s like when you see a tennis player: they’ve got the high ball and it’s going to be an easy smash to win the point, and then they put it in the net because they start overthinking it.
George Russell, Mercedes
Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images
“George is in that phase of the season where Kimi is just instinctively driving and having, other than Barcelona, some pretty good reliability, whereas George has been taking the punches and he’s a little bit older.
“Experience is a good thing, but the benefit of youth is you don’t know what you don’t know. The downside of experience is you do know the challenges and the difficulty and momentum and all those good things.
“As we know from Max Verstappen last year, it’s still possible to come back from that points deficit. But listen, not even Sylvester Stallone would write a Rocky movie with that sort of comeback from all the punches that he’s taken. So it’s going to be a character-building year for George.”
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