George Russell suffered a software problem in the Mercedes Formula 1 engine during the grid for the Hungarian Grand Prix, sending the revs out of control and triggering his slow start.
On Saturday, a water leak caused by hitting a curb destroyed his engine and forced Mercedes to change the engine before the race. But on the grid, a problem at the start triggered the anti-stall system, costing him several positions and summing up his terrible run over the summer break.
It was anything but a smooth Hungarian GP weekend for Russell, who understandably admitted after the race that he needed a break to recharge after a first half of the season marked more by regrets than rewards.
Budapest reflected these frustrations perfectly. It wasn’t really about absolute pace, and Russell himself admitted that even without the engine failure, a top three finish in qualifying would have been unrealistic. It was more about how a series of unfortunate moments piled up and turned an already difficult weekend into something even harder to digest.
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What went wrong for Russell in the beginning
The startup problem that triggered the anti-stall is a clear example. But what actually happened? Over the radio, the team initially suspected it might be driver error, noting that Russell appeared to be lifting off the accelerator during the start-up process while the engine was revving to build up the necessary boost for takeoff.
Valtteri Bottas, Cadillac Racing
Photo by: Bryn Lennon / Formula 1 via Getty Images
Although Russell did indeed lift his foot slightly and go from around 30% throttle to under 10% throttle with the lights on, this was not the root cause but rather the result of another problem. As Toto Wolff explained after the race, there was a technical problem that was beyond the driver’s control.
“It looks like he gave about 10% throttle and got the whole thing up to full speed, he took off the gas and it jumped down, so I’m really not happy that there were too many mistakes. So that was the reason and then he drove very well,” explained Wolff, who later added to Sky Sports that the situation in terms of reliability and technical problems in this first part of the season was simply unacceptable.
This reconstruction matches Russell’s words after the race. The British driver explained that at one point he noticed that the engine speed was increasing well beyond the threshold, so he tried to bring it back down by modulating the throttle. In short, his adjustment of the pedal was the result of the error, not the cause.
“I was on the accelerator, holding the revs up, and all of a sudden, about four seconds before the lights went out, the engine just started cranking. And I responded with the throttle, but it didn’t do anything. So the engine didn’t respond to the throttle,” Russell explained.
In fact, drivers must maintain precise throttle position to generate the required turbo boost. The driver can also monitor this directly on the steering wheel, as during the starting process it is displayed to him whether the engine speed is too high or too low and he can adjust accordingly. Looking at the Mercedes’ onboard footage, it’s clear that the engine speed progression when the five red lights came on was anything but linear, a detail that was fully confirmed by the telemetry.
A comparison with his teammate Kimi Antonelli illustrates the problem. At the start of the sequence, during the additional five-second preparation time introduced this year, both drivers reached around 30% throttle as per standard procedure. However, while the Italian’s drive and engine speed remained completely stable at around 12,300 rpm, the situation with Russell was significantly different.
In Russell’s car, the engine speed rose to over 12,700 rpm and briefly reached up to 12,800 rpm, which is an exceptionally high value. It was precisely for this reason that Russell, as he later explained, tried to modulate his throttle input by taking his foot almost completely off the pedal. But even that wasn’t enough to stabilize the situation.
In fact, telemetry shows that the engine speed dropped well below 12,000 rpm for a brief moment, then rose again to around 12,600 rpm, even though Russell was applying less than 10% throttle.
This gave rise to the second part of the problem, because when Russell started from the start he only held the throttle at 9% and could not push it any further, while Antonelli was at 30% to produce the usual starting impulse.
As Russell tried to get out of his starting box, the engine suddenly lost a significant amount of rpm, probably because he started with less than 10% throttle. While Antonelli’s engine speed hovered around 5,800 rpm at the moment of disengagement, Russell’s dropped to 4,500 rpm. Without sufficient drive, the car triggered anti-stall protection.
It was an issue that marred Russell’s entire race and one that the team had actually already encountered during pre-season testing in Bahrain. “It was obviously a brand new engine. I think we had seen that before in pre-season but I have no idea,” Russell admitted.
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https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/how-engine-software-issue-caused-george-russells-slow-start-at-hungarian-gp/10842492/
