Former F1 race winner Johnny Herbert believes George Russell will only continue to make life difficult for Lewis Hamilton with his performances at Mercedes.
Mercedes have arguably the best driver pairing on the current F1 grid, with Hamilton one of the greatest racing drivers of all-time and Russell producing a number of stellar performances since his arrival in the sport, and indeed since his arrival within the Silver Arrows’ garage.
The younger Briton is now a race winner, having taken victory at the Brazilian Grand Prix last year, and continues to shine with him in with a firm chance of P1 in Australia last time out before a double whammy of misfortune via an unluckily-timed pit-stop and a mechanical issue stopped him in his tracks.
Clearly, though, he has shown he belongs right at the front and for Herbert, who recently launched new F1 podcast Lift The Lid alongside Billy Monger, Russell’s displays will only continue to give Hamilton something to think about moving forwards:
“George is going to be getting stronger and stronger and it’s going to make Lewis’ life more difficult,” he said to GIVEMESPORT,” just because George is like Max [Verstappen,] like Lando [Norris,] like Charles [Leclerc,] where they’re all that next generation coming along. It still shocks me and surprises me – they always seem to get better, always by a little bit.
“Looking back to Ayrton [Senna] or Alain [Prost] people were like ‘wow,’ but there was always something better. Michael [Schumacher] came in and Mika [Hakkinen] came in. Then Lewis and Seb [Vettel] came along, and now we’ve got Max.
“So this new generation is going to be stronger than what it was with Lewis. And so he’s got to think does he want to end the latter part of his career potentially being beaten by his team-mate? Or do you try and end it in a more positive manner? I don’t want to see him walk away yet, because I think he still has a lot to offer. Eventually, he will retire, but he’s got time and he’s still got the fire to do it.”
Billy Monger and Johnny Herbert have recently launched the Lift The Lid podcast to give the inside track on being a racing driver. Subscribe to the Lift The Lid podcast here via your favourite podcast platform.
