Mercedes are investigating what caused the “heat damage” done to the battery which ended George Russell‘s hopes of winning the Canadian Grand Prix last weekend. It could also have significant repercussions for the Brit in the title race as he finds himself trailing team-mate Kimi Antonelli by 43 points after just five rounds of the season.
The two Mercedes racers were emboroiled in a tense, thrilling battle for the lead for almost the whole of the first half of the Montreal race. But the duel came to an abrupt end when Russell pulled over while leading, having suffered an engine failure. Antonelli went on to win the race unchallenged.
Mercedes are still looking into the exact causes of the failure, but team principal Toto Wolff said after the race that it was the battery in Russell’s engine that had cause it to shut down. And technical director James Allison has now offered further insight into the “engine kill”.
He said: “It was a big weekend for us. Key because it was the weekend where we introduced our first major upgrade for the year. We were looking for it to be strong. It was. But a weekend that was otherwise extremely good from a performance point of view was marred by the disappointment we all feel for letting George down with the reliability of the car.
“On George’s power unit failure, 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 and brought George’s race to an end. We could see enough at the end of the race that the battery was fairly unhappy, some heat damage there. We’ll have to figure out in the coming days and weeks exactly what caused that and put it right.”
Antonelli’s win was his fourth in a row and marked the first time in F1 World Championship history that a driver has taken their first four Grand Prix victories consecutively. The 43-point lead over Russell that he enjoys as a result is a larger lead than any driver had at any point during the 2025 campaign, when the biggest gap was the 34 points between Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris after the Aussie’s Zandvoort win.
And in terms of what each of them can bring on a race weekend, Martin Brundle feels there is “nothing to choose between Russell and Antonelli at the moment”. He said: “Experience and wisdom seems to match unbridled speed and enthusiasm perfectly, and that’s why they keep meeting in the middle of a corner.
“They constantly seemed to be side by side especially when either driver ran a touch deep on the brakes into the Turn 10 hairpin. That is until Russell’s Merc expired for good with a rare technical failure and he was out. Russell is now 43 points behind his teenage team-mate, that’s equivalent to a first and second place, and he has to believe that what goes around comes around.”