Russell started the race for Williams in tenth and moved up to eighth place early after Charles Leclerc and Pierre Gasly made contact on the first lap.
The Williams driver was able to hold onto his position, keeping drivers like Daniel Ricciardo and Yuki Tsunoda behind him and even closing in on Fernando Alonso in seventh place towards the end of the first stint.
But after Williams informed Russell that it had switched to “Plan B” for reliability reasons, the team began to take action on a problem with the generator set.
Russell’s first pit stop lasted 18 seconds before pitting a second time to allow pneumatic cooling and drop him to the bottom of the field.
Williams brought Russell down at the end of lap 38 to take the car out of circulation and left some of the team members head in hands in the garage after seeing the chance of a first point spot since Germany 2019.
“It’s such a shame,” Russell said of Ziggo Sport after retiring.
“Running is never easy. It’s never … fair is not the right word. You make your own fortune and in the end something went wrong today.
“But for us we’re not here all the time, and it’s just typical. I don’t really know what to think or say to be honest.
“It’s a shame for everyone on the team. They worked so hard for it and it took so long.
“Those points today would have been huge, not just for morale, but if I’d finished P8 or P7 – I think P7 was probably possible, I was faster than Alonso – four or six points in the constructors’ championship would have been huge. Absolutely massive for us. “
Russell said it was “just a technical problem” that Williams was investigating and confirmed that it “had something to do with pneumatic pressure”.
Since his debut in early 2019, Russell had the only point spot in his one-race appearance for Mercedes at Sakhir last year when he finished 9th.
Eighth place or higher would have lifted Williams to eighth place in the constructors’ championship ahead of Alfa Romeo and was the team’s best result since the 2018 Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
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