George Russell's long wait for a second chapter in his 2026 championship campaign finally ended on Saturday in Baku.
The Mercedes driver converted his commanding pole position into a narrow victory at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, holding off Max Verstappen by just a tenth of a second after 51 laps around the unforgiving Baku City Street Circuit.
More importantly, the win cuts his deficit to team-mate and championship leader Kimi Antonelli to 66 points, putting Russell back within striking distance after a difficult middle portion of the season.
For the Briton, however, the significance of the victory went beyond the championship arithmetic.
After struggling to consistently extract the potential of Mercedes' W17 compared with Antonelli, Russell believes the work put into adapting his driving to the 2026 car is finally paying dividends.
Patience through the difficult spell
Russell's victory was his first since Austria and capped a run of increasingly strong performances since the summer break.
He had already taken podiums in the Netherlands and Monza before producing a near-perfect weekend in Baku, qualifying on pole and controlling the race from the front.
“Yeah, it feels great to be honest,” he said.
“I’m very proud of the sort of resilience that I and my close group of engineers have shown during the tough periods this year, because there’s been a lot of hard work to overcome some of the challenges to adapt my driving style to suit this new car better.
“And F1 is so tough, you don’t get opportunities to practise this.”
The challenge has been particularly demanding under the sport's new regulations, with Russell admitting that extracting the best from the W17 required him to reshape aspects of his driving rather than simply expecting the car to respond as its predecessor had.
At Baku, that adaptation finally appeared almost instinctive.
‘I feel I can fight for victory week in week out’
Russell described the weekend as the culmination of a gradual process rather than a sudden breakthrough.
“It’s coming to me a bit more intuitively than it once did,” he added. “And I’m gaining confidence, especially on circuits like this, it just allows you to eke out that little bit more on the brakes, get that little bit closer to the walls.
“And it’s been a flawless weekend.”
The result also reflects a period in which Russell refused to lose faith despite being unable to match Antonelli's consistency earlier in the campaign.
“Yeah, I think I never lost that faith in myself, even through tough moments. I knew there was a reason why I was off the pace,”he explained.
His recent results suggest that patience is beginning to bear fruit. Since the Dutch Grand Prix, Russell has collected three podiums in four races, with Baku providing the first victory to complete the resurgence.
2026 Azerbaijan Grand Prix - Race results“It wasn’t like I just suddenly forgot how to drive. And I knew I would be able to to find it again. I just had to be patient,” he concluded.
“So I feel confident now. It’s been four races since the break and on the front row in three of them. So three podiums from the four races, I feel I can fight for victory week in week out now.”
With the championship gap now down to 66 points, Russell heads into the return to Sepang for the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia with renewed momentum, and a considerably stronger platform from which to challenge his Mercedes team-mate.
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