George Russell received a vote of confidence from Thierry Boutsen, after a turbulent start to the 2026 Formula 1 season. The former F1 driver believes the Briton will recover his performance and overcome the difficult phase experienced this year.
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Russell is in third place in the drivers’ championship, with 160 points after 11 rounds, but is 59 points behind teammate Kimi Antonelli. The deficit was widened by reliability issues, incidents, and difficulties in regularly extracting the maximum from the W17.
The season started positively for Russell, who won the Australian GP, but his situation worsened over the following rounds. A retirement while leading in Canada was a major blow, while a first-lap collision with Lewis Hamilton at Spa-Francorchamps and an anti-stall problem at the start of the Hungarian GP also hurt his points tally.
Meanwhile, Antonelli won five of the first six races and already has six victories in 2026. The Italian adapted to the car’s behavior more naturally, while Russell admitted early in the season that he was ‘perplexed’ by his loss of performance.
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Boutsen, who won three GPs for Williams between 1989 and 1990, considers that Russell’s current moment is part of a common cycle in a driver’s career: “It is also normal to go through cycles like this in a career, when everything is going very well, and suddenly, you lose a bit of confidence, the car has a problem, then you lose even more confidence and enter a cycle where everything goes wrong,” he told the official Formula 1 website.
The Belgian, however, does not see the current phase as definitive: “George will come back, for sure. Whenever he has the opportunity, he will come back,” added Boutsen, who also warned about the possibility of Antonelli facing similar difficulties in the future: “Drivers go through these moments of doubt and psychological difficulties, and Kimi will have that too. Maybe not this year, next year, maybe in two years, we’ll see,” he concluded.
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