Mercedes drops notice to Major George Russell as Toto Wolff ponders Valtteri Botta’s ax | F1 | Sports

George Russell will test a Mercedes with 2022 tires in Hungary on Tuesday.

The Williams driver, a Mercedes junior racing driver, will sit behind the wheel of a Mercedes with 18-inch tires instead of the current 13-inch rubbers.

Formula 1 is ushering in a wave of new regulations for next season designed to help cars track and overtake each other more easily in order to further improve the quality of races, including bigger tires.

On Tuesday, Mercedes will help provide tire suppliers Pirelli – as well as Ferrari and McLaren – with data by strapping the 2022 tires to a W12 and driving through Budapest.

And it will be more Russell than Hamilton or Bottas that gives a new clue as to where his future lies in the next season.

Russell already tested for Mercedes in Hungary in 2017 and two years ago also drove unrivaled for the Silver Arrows in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi.

He replaced a Covid-ridden Hamilton at the Sakhir Grand Prix in Bahrain last season and finished in P9, although he could have won the race without a pit stop mistake and a punctured tire.

The 23-year-old, who scored his first F1 points with Williams at the Hungarian Grand Prix last Sunday and was ninth at the same time, is about to move up to Mercedes full-time next year.

A decision is to be made during the summer break before the Belgian Grand Prix in Spa on Sunday 29 August.

Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff is thinking about whether to extend Bottas’ Silver Arrow contract for a sixth season or to mess things up and get Russell – who was particularly successful in qualifying for Williams, but failed on Sunday due to the slower racing pace was left – for a new dynamic.

Hamilton was named world champion in all four full seasons in which he was on the side of Bottas and Mercedes has not lost the constructors’ championship since 2013.

Bottas, however, is currently on 108 points, 87 behind team-mate and championship leader Hamilton, and there are calls for the young Briton to come to the Mercedes garage.

“I literally shed a tear earlier, I literally don’t know where it came from; it all just came out,” he said on the F1 TV post-race show.

“It means so much more than just getting points. When you fight for so long, at some point you just think: will it ever happen?

“When the situation happened in Imola [when Russell crashed with Valtteri Bottas]when I was in Austria – P8 – and … collapsed, then Fernando [Alonso] overtook me a couple of laps to the end.

“And then with Silverstone to get the penalty – maybe deserved, maybe not – I felt like today that probably” [going to make up for it] and we’re probably even on the lucky side of things, and I think we’ve really made capital.

“It means so much. I got pretty emotional, to be honest, because it’s not just a P9; it’s been three years of hard work for me personally.

“Four years for the team, real disappointments along the way, tough moments – not just for me personally, because what I experience, the team also experience. It’s just a great relief. “