George Russell E-Book

James Gray

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 393

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

From James Gray, author of the bestselling Max Verstappen, comes the very first biography of Lewis Hamilton's designated successor George Russell, published to mark the British Grand Prix. From dominating the karting tracks of East Anglia to the top of the podium in Formula 3 and Formula 2, George Russell has now fully established himself as a rising Formula 1 star. After cutting his teeth as a driver with Williams, in 2022 he signed a lucrative contract with Mercedes, highlighting the extent of his raw talent. Driving for Mercedes, Russell has been confirmed as the designated successor to none other than Lewis Hamilton. As Hamilton's heir-apparent, will this protégé manage to follow in the footsteps of the greatest F1 driver of all time? Sports journalist and author of Max Verstappen James Gray traces how George Russell has been setting the racing track alight since the age of seven and how he is now destined to become the successor to the crown of British motor racing.

Leseprobe

James Gray is a sports news correspondent at the i newspaper, covering a wide range of sport including Formula One, boxing, football and tennis.

Published in the UK and USA in 2023 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773-010-0

eBook: 978-183773-011-7

Text copyright © 2023 James Gray

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in the UK

CONTENTS

Prologue

1Early Days

2Russell Jr

3Let’s Go Karting

4Building a Reputation

5A Solid Platform

6Hard Racing

7The Price of Success

8Talent-spotted

9The Mercedes Family

10A Champion Again

11Ready and Waiting

12An Historic Name

13Patience is a Virtue

14Finally at the Front

George Russell Professional Racing Record

Acknowledgements

PROLOGUE

It was not the first time that George Russell had found himself crying into his crash helmet, and it wouldn’t be the last, either. But after all the contrasting emotions of what had been the biggest week of his young life, maybe nothing would hurt as much as this.

The previous hours and days had been a whirlwind, a psychologically and physically testing week the likes of which Russell had never experienced. It started when his phone rang during a 2am trip to the bathroom. It was a call he would probably not have answered had he not blearily noticed the name flashing up in front of him: Toto Wolff. It must have been important – and it was. Lewis Hamilton had tested positive for Covid-19 just four days before the first practice session of the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix in Bahrain, and Russell was top of Wolff’s list of replacements. The team principle of Mercedes would have to convince Williams too, but first of all, he wanted to see if the man he had virtually anointed as Hamilton’s future teammate was up for it. There was no hesitation. Of course he was.

‘Leave it with me,’ Wolff told him, after which he spent the next 24 hours trying to thrash out a deal with Williams to lend him their driver for a week. The Mercedes customer team had already stopped Russell making the move to the Silver Arrows once, activating the one-year option in his contract that would mean he could not replace Valtteri Bottas in 2021. They did not want to do so again, but it was still a business decision and there were many moving parts. Russell’s phone rang almost constantly the following day, more than 60 times in all, but eventually a deal was reached. Sensationally, he would make his Mercedes debut with just a few days’ notice.

It would not be a completely cold start of course. Russell had logged hundreds of hours in the Mercedes simulator and had driven their car on track. But never in a live race. He was almost four inches taller than Hamilton too and had to wear race boots one size too small in order to squeeze into the car. There were adjustments they could make, but they couldn’t rebuild the car for him. Russell would just have to fit.

It was like nothing he had contended with before. Tall for his age just about all his life, Russell’s height had nearly cost him a junior title because he wasn’t able to operate the pedals properly and suffered at starts. Like so often, though, his racing ability saw him through.

And so it was in Sakhir. Despite everything, Russell beat Max Verstappen in the first practice session of the weekend by just under two tenths and logged the most laps of anyone. It helped that Mercedes had been so utterly dominant that season, of course, winning all but one race up to that point, and perhaps it helped that the Sakhir Grand Prix was being held on a newly laid-out Bahrain track, something of an equaliser. But nevertheless, it was not the result anyone expected. Once again Russell had surprised them.

No one could have predicted what would follow either. Russell missed out on pole position by just two hundredths of a second, which even on a short lap that lasted just 53 seconds was still an infinitesimally small margin, to Valtteri Bottas, the man who had been signed up for another year in the very seat Russell coveted and who was determined not to let the Brit make him look bad.

On race day, though, Russell was on course to do exactly that, a young upstart with serious ambitions on debut, outdriving his far more experienced teammate who had driven past him and looked more than comfortable leading the race. But then disaster struck. Mercedes botched a pit stop so badly that Russell had to return to the pits and get the right tyres fitted. In the confusion of a last-minute stop, the team had managed to fit Bottas’ tyres to Russell’s Mercedes, which is not allowed under motor-racing regulations. His double pit stop saw him drop from first to fifth, but with the safety car deployed at the time, it was not game over by any stretch.

But fate, not content with landing one sucker-punch to Russell’s gut, swung for him again. Having brilliantly overtaken Bottas for the second time in the race, he was up to second within four laps. There were still fourteen to go and Sergio Pérez, the surprise leader who had been dead-last at one point, was only 3.5 seconds ahead. Russell’s first win was there for the taking. A first podium was in the bag, surely?

‘Looks like a rear-left puncture,’ Russell’s engineer told him over the radio with eight laps to go. He could scarcely believe it, but there he was again in the pits, and as Pérez crossed for the win a few minutes later, Russell went over in ninth. He was mentally and physically exhausted, and had his balaclava not already been wet through with sweat, it would have been further dampened by his tears. Once he had parked up, he could barely walk back to the Mercedes garage. His legs were cramping and stiff, and he waved off fans hoping for a picture, but before he had even made it to the garage, he dumped himself on a dusty concrete step and put his head in a towel. Someone passed him his water bottle and, with a thousand-yard stare that told you all you needed to know, he wiped his eyes and tried to rehydrate. A few Mercedes team members came up to him and provided consolatory pats on his shoulder, but no words were exchanged.

In that moment, Russell did not know about the tears of happiness that were in his stars: after winning his first points for Williams in Hungary in 2021 and then after earning his first F1 race win in Brazil in 2022. This was a low, and he could only hope that highs would follow. But he could not know for sure that they would. He could only believe.

1

EARLY DAYS

Driving into the sleepy Fenland village of Tydd St Giles, there is a sign that warns you to ‘reduce your speed’. Periodically, it is amusingly vandalised to remove the first and last letter of the final word. But in its original form, it is a stern warning to those who want to treat the flattest part of England as a racetrack.

To perhaps the village’s most famous son, though, it might read as something of a challenge. In George Russell’s line of work, speed is the only thing that matters.

It’s hard to overstate the contrast between the world Russell now inhabits, of sports cars, expensive watches and glamorous photo shoots, and the one in which he grew up, living in the tiny Cambridgeshire hamlet of Tydd St Giles, wedged up against the Lincolnshire border and home to just a few hundred people and precious few children.

There is little reason to have heard of the village before. A man called Mike Ashton made headlines in the 1980s after his local bungalow was subject to a police raid over a tobacco-smuggling operation. Residents still remember the Sunday People double-page investigation, the helicopters overhead and HMRC tearing the bungalow apart searching for evidence. Ashton, who said he had never done anything wrong, was in hiding from gangs involved in a £20 million-a-year racket moving cheap tobacco from Belgium to the UK. Ashton did indeed sell the tobacco, and legally, but denied being involved in the illegal smuggling. Out of fear of the gangs, who thought he was involved and because of threats made to his family, his house was covered in security cameras and police monitored his phone calls. It was a scandal that dominated the papers for several weekends, but it did not live long in the memory much after that, although in the village, it is something of a legendary tale.

A traditional farming community, they don’t need the newspapers – whether it be the Sunday People, the Eastern Daily Press or the Wisbech Standard – to tell them anything they do not already know because not much happens between the asparagus fields without everyone getting to know about it soon enough. This being England, there is a pub, of course – the centre of such gossip. The Crown and Mitre does local beers, some of which have been brewed in this part of the world for hundreds of years, and a steak and ale pie that is the stuff of legend. There is a vintage scooter club that has been meeting there for decades, perhaps the village’s only vague link to motor racing. There is a new microbrewery nearby too – the Tydd Steam Brewery – like much in this part of the world, tucked away behind green hedgerows and algae-covered gates. It is a quiet corner of England, apart from the distant grumble of a tractor or the echoing cluck-and-pop of a shotgun unsuccessfully aimed at a pheasant.

One noisy thing that does exist between the hedges, though, is an obsession with engines and machinery. This could be a result of the fact that East Anglia is only truly habitable through various miraculous feats of engineering by virtue of its marshland status – Tydd St Giles itself has an average altitude of zero metres above sea level and is bordered by the North Level Main Drain, one of the many dead-straight waterways that crisscross the Fenland counties and are crucial to their very existence. For years, diesel engines drove pumping stations that lifted water from the drains into the rivers, ensuring the Fenlands remained dry. At the nearby Tydd Gote pumping station, three enormous green engines pumped tonnes of water into the River Nene until as recently as 2007, when the station was converted to electricity. Even as far back as the Roman occupation of Britain, there were attempts to drain parts of the area, alongside the construction of raised gravel causeways across some of the marshlands. In the 10th century, the Danes built dykes primarily for defensive purposes, but also created higher paths and roads that were later used to move building materials long distances, establishing and then enriching the monasteries that owned much of the land. Before then, the majority of the area from the Wash to Cambridge was unusable swamp.

All of the various societies that ruled over the Fens relied on varying levels of ingenuity to bend the land to the will of man, and while there is now a widespread effort to restore parts of the region to their natural state, this neck of the woods remains one whose very existence is propped up by axles, gears and grease, no matter what the fuel or energy that powers them.

The Fens has birthed some of motor sport’s most recognisable figures too. Bernie Ecclestone, the godfather of modern Formula One, spent the earliest part of his life in St Peter down in Suffolk, albeit in a very different era: born in 1930, he would travel the five miles to his first school on a horse-drawn milk wagon. His family eventually moved to Kent, away from rural Suffolk and its lack of basic amenities, where they still had to pump water in the back yard, but the east of England can still claim him as one of their own.

So too Martin Brundle, who was born in King’s Lynn, the closest large town to where Russell grew up, with a population of nearly 50,000 people. Brundle was raised surrounded by cars – his father John was a rally enthusiast and a vehicle trader – so he was no stranger to taking engines apart and putting them back together again. At just twelve years old, he built himself a Ford Anglia to race at Pott Row, where they held grass-track ‘banger’ races, a format that allows and encourages contact between cars and is always entertaining to watch. Once he was sixteen, he moved up to hot-rod racing, a more orthodox format that to this day holds its world championship in the Suffolk town of Ipswich. He moved onwards and upwards, first racing saloon cars under the name of his father’s dealership and then funded into single seaters by Carter Builder, a Lincolnshire-based construction firm, retaining his Fenland roots.

Having shown plenty of pace and completely falling in love with racing, Brundle wanted to move into bigger and faster vehicles but needed someone to take a chance on him. Still a teenager, he wrote to Tom Walkinshaw, asking directly for a drive. Walkinshaw had driven in Formula Two before launching his own eponymous racing team and took a punt on Brundle, putting him at the wheel in a BMW Championship race. He qualified on the front row and finished second. It earned him Walkinshaw’s lasting respect and set him on a path that eventually took him all the way to the podium in Formula One. It was not the orthodox way into top-tier racing – even with Walkinshaw, Brundle reputedly rarely had more than a handshake rather than a contract – but Brundle has often quoted the old saying, ‘People in Norfolk dew [sic] things different.’

It was particularly poignant, and maybe no coincidence, that Brundle’s big BMW result, the one that he describes as the most important of his fledgling career, came at Snetterton, the biggest racetrack in the east of England, hosting races in the British Touring Car Championship, British GT Championship and the British Superbike Championship, as well as Formula 4 rounds and some regional Formula 3 racing. The circuit is situated on an old air base, abandoned after the Second World War and easily converted into a racetrack. In fact, East Anglia is replete with such opportunities: there are a total of 53 former Royal Air Force stations in Norfolk alone, as well as another 32 in Suffolk, 26 in Essex and 22 in Cambridgeshire. It is perhaps surprising there are not more racetracks in this part of the country given these numbers.

Snetterton, though, has remained a hub for motor sport in the area. In years gone by, that was in no small part thanks to Jim Russell, Norfolk’s first real local racing celebrity. Russell was no relation to George, but did grow up in Downham Market, just fourteen miles away from Tydd St Giles. Born in 1920 above the fish and chip shop that his parents ran, he was one of six children and was christened Herbert James Russell. Having first worked selling ice cream from a bicycle, he joined the RAF and serviced aircraft in Africa and then Italy during the war, before returning to England and opening a car dealership.

Racing came later, and by chance. He went down to Snetterton in 1952 with a friend and decided, with typical post-war bravado, that he quite fancied a go at that. At 32, he ended up making his way into Formula 3 in a Cooper-JAP Mk VI, a small single-seater racer with a motorcycle engine in it. When he later replaced the JAP engine with a faster Manx Norton one, he started winning races, and in 1954 he beat Stirling Moss, arguably the greatest British racer of all time and the best in the world during the early post-war years, at Brands Hatch. He regularly raced and beat the likes of Moss, Jack Brabham and Bruce McLaren on his way up the ranks, before disaster struck at Le Mans in the famous 24-hour race when Russell crashed, sustaining third-degree burns, two broken wrists, broken ribs and a broken leg. His brother Peter managed to arrange a private plane to fly him back to England where he began his recovery. He did race again but never at the same level, and he retired soon afterwards.

Jim set up his racing school before he himself actually started racing. He sought to create a simple and inexpensive model for those who could not necessarily afford to race as privateers to train as racing drivers, paying just over a pound a week for one full day of lessons every month for a year. Drivers who passed the course could enter club-level events, and after six races, they could move up to compete internationally for a team that was sponsored by Russell’s driving school. It was a machine that seemed to feed and fund itself: Russell had created the world’s first driving academy.

‘He really established the template on which most other racing drivers’ schools came to be based,’ said commentator Ian Titchmarsh after Russell’s death. He was not far wrong. Russell was something of a visionary.

His greatest success story, apart from launching four more Jim Russell Racing Driver Schools, one at Silverstone and three more all over the world, was Emerson Fittipaldi. He came to learn under Russell in 1969, and within one season of his tutelage, the Brazilian was British F3 champion. In 1972 and 1974, he won the F1 world title. Other successful drivers followed in his footsteps, including Derek Bell and Jacques Villeneuve. When Russell died at the age of 98 in March 2019, the Jim Russell Trophy Meeting at Snetterton, featuring a series of classic revival races from the 1970s, was inaugurated.

In the 1990s, the driver school moved to Donington and is now a franchised brand, while the garage he ran in Downham Market has since been turned into housing. But the name Jim Russell still resonates in those parts as someone who gave thousands of drivers their first taste of racing – it also features as the name of the housing development where his dealership used to stand.

Long before George had got behind a steering wheel for the first time, the name Russell was already synonymous with motoring success in his Fenland hometown.

2

RUSSELL JR

The Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports is probably not high on the list of subscription titles for many motor-racing fans, so it’s entirely likely that not a single one will have read the article on ‘Sibling dynamics and sport expertise’, published in the February 2015 edition.

In it, sports scientists from Australia and Canada collaborated to analyse data across 33 different sports from over 300 athletes. They felt much of the previous research into the familial influence on sporting development was focused on the parents and instead wanted to learn more about the influence of siblings on an individual’s sporting success. They found that there was a significant trend towards younger siblings being more successful in sport.

‘Elite athletes were more likely to be later-born children, while pre-elite and non-elite athletes were more likely to be first-born,’ the study concluded.

‘Compared with siblings of non-elite athletes, siblings of elite athletes were more likely to have participated in regular physical activity and were more likely to have participated in sport at the pre-elite and elite levels. These results suggest siblings may play a key role in sport expertise development.’

What was particularly interesting about the findings was that previous studies into sibling performance found first-born children to be high achievers in academic and professional life, with some assumption that this would translate into sport. It had previously been noted, however, that in early motor-skills tests, later-born children would generally outperform first-born counterparts, suggesting that some of the advantages of having an older brother or sister start very early on in life.

To some families, this was not news. By 2015, tennis player Andy Murray had already won two grand slam titles and an Olympic gold medal and was some way towards becoming world number one. His mother Judy in the stands, raucously cheering and applauding her son’s every win, often drew the eye of TV cameras and, inevitably, the attention of the public. She was credited with having performed something of a miracle by raising a tennis player able to overcome the suffocating expectations of the British sporting collective and win Wimbledon, the first home player to triumph in the men’s singles for 77 years.

Judy herself had been a national-level player in Scotland and briefly played on the professional tour, but quickly swapped playing for coaching. Once her two sons Jamie and Andy were old enough, she took them to the local courts and started coaching them. Jamie, who was fifteen months older than Andy, was the most naturally gifted of the two.

‘I’m not sure if I took to it straight away,’ Andy says. ‘I can’t really remember, but my mum said I wasn’t very good.’

However, Andy was competitive, fiercely so. Swingball – where the ball is attached to a central pole and players bat it back and forth in a circle – was a family favourite, but it was never played purely for fun. There had to be points on offer to denote a winner and a loser. More often than not, Andy was the loser: fifteen months is not a big gap in age, but when you’re three or four, it represents an enormous chunk of physical development.

Some of that competitiveness came from the family environment, of course. As well as Judy’s own credentials, her father Roy had played professional football in the 1950s as well as high-level tennis, and the Murray boys spent plenty of time at their grandparents’ house growing up.

But the sibling dynamic also created an environment for Andy to excel physically. He was constantly held to a physical standard impossibly higher than his own, creating what sports coaches call a ‘stretch goal’. The concept behind stretch goals is that athletes who constantly achieve goals that are within their reach pull up, satisfied to have done what was asked of them. A stretch goal that is beyond their capabilities, and of which they often fall short, creates a drive forwards, an incentive for constant improvement, and it tends to cut off complacency at source.

In the early 1990s, they might not have had a name, but stretch goals certainly played a part in the Murray household. As well as tennis, Jamie and Andy were both keen footballers, albeit the latter more so. Jamie had already been identified as one of the top junior tennis players in the UK and had pretty much committed to the sport before he reached the age of ten. Andy struggled to keep up with him on the court and still held out hopes of pulling on the green-and-white shirt of Edinburgh side Hibernian, just as his grandpa Roy had done. Mentally, he was not as tunnel-visioned, but physically he was well beyond his age group.

Eventually, Andy did fully commit to tennis and with great success, the stretch factor of having to beat his brother (it remains a point of family contention exactly when he first achieved this) no doubt having played a part in his development, but the sibling rivalry remained. Both played a lot of golf growing up and still get out together when they can, arguing about who is better. Jamie got down to a handicap of three at one point, a claim to which Andy once responded in a joint interview: ‘I must be a two-handicap golfer because I always beat you.’ Clearly, those early Swingball clashes were just a sign of things to come.

The Murrays are among tennis’ most famous siblings, but probably cannot top Serena and Venus Williams. They do have plenty in common, though, having both won grand slam titles (albeit Jamie only in doubles). Most relevantly in this case, though, there is also a clear hierarchy in their relationship, and once again the younger sibling is by far the more successful.

Like the Murrays, Serena and Venus grew up in a tennis-playing family. Their father was a self-taught coach who learned his techniques from old VHS tapes of other trainers. He was an eccentric to a fault, but his results are undeniable. Between them, his daughters have won 30 grand slam singles titles and on more than one occasion have faced each other in a final. Richard Williams is one of the few men in history to have had a seat reserved in both players’ boxes in a Wimbledon final. As they were growing up, Richard fought and worked to get his daughters time on court, to take them to tournaments and to get them in front of elite-level coaches. But Serena emerged as the stronger player, something she in part attributes to the white-hot jealousy that enveloped her when she saw Venus, older and, like Jamie Murray, the more talented player in the very early days, get opportunities that she was not afforded. Even once they were professionals and grand slam winners their father was still there offering advice.

Tennis is an individual sport. A parent who can drive, both physically and metaphorically, their child to the limits of their talent and beyond is virtually a requirement for success. Almost every individual sport in the modern era has a cut-off point beyond which if you have not already reached international level competition, you probably never will. A couple of decades ago, that might have been the age of 29 or 30. Now, it’s closer to fifteen or sixteen.

Cricket is a team sport, but one that is effectively played by eleven individuals doing very different individual things at various times. One of the greatest players of the 21st century, A.B. de Villiers grew up with two older brothers Jan and Wessels, who are eleven and six years older than him respectively. Such a large gap created a huge stretch factor, with young A.B. forced to fight for the right to take part in the famed de Villiers backyard games. He would be required to field and fetch drinks all day for his brothers and their friends, until sometimes being allowed to bat at the end of the day. In his autobiography, he recalls how invariably it would be Gerrit Deist, a friend of his brothers, twice his age and playing a level of cricket just below professional, bowling to him.

‘Even now, whenever I’m asked to name the best bowler I have ever faced, the answer that springs most quickly to mind is Gerrit Deist,’ he wrote in his 2016 memoir.

‘That’s not the response I give in media interviews because it would need to be followed by a lengthy explanation but it’s the truth.’

A.B. saw this as an opportunity to impress, to earn the respect of the older boys by persevering and scoring runs, despite the fact Deist was bowling with a tennis ball from fourteen yards (a cricket pitch is usually 22 yards long) and A.B. was using a bat several sizes too big for him.

Such backyard games were a near daily occurrence, or when the weather was better, they turned the garden into a golf course or jumped off the roof into the swimming pool, competing with each other to do more daring and impressive tricks or flips. It is no coincidence that A.B. turned out to be one of the most successful cricketers of his generation. He was more than just a cricketer too, he was an innovator in the way he played the game, hitting the ball in ways that others could not even imagine, as well as being a remarkable fielder and sometime wicketkeeper. He even played other sports before dedicating himself to cricket, getting his golf handicap down to one and occasionally topping the national age group tennis rankings. (He insists the stories about swimming or playing hockey to international level are apocryphal, though.) Ultimately, he was a brilliant all-round athlete.

Racing drivers are not immune to the influence of siblings and parents either, even though theirs is a sport where physicality is not such an obvious component. The F1 grid often features surnames that are familiar to fans who have been around long enough to remember their fathers or even their grandfathers: 1996 world champion Damon Hill was following in the footsteps of his father Graham 30 years before; Nico Rosberg matched his dad Keke when he triumphed and won the world title in 2016; Max Verstappen’s maiden championship in 2021 was more than his father Jos could ever manage, but he did still race in F1; and every time a Fittipaldi loses a drive, they seem to be replaced by two more, like some sort of petrol-fuelled hydra. Wilson Fittipaldi (born 1943) was the first of six (so far) of the family to race professionally, while Enzo (born 2001) was part of the Ferrari Driver Academy and has raced in F3 and F2.

That is not to say that one cannot succeed without having been born to a dynasty of past world champions. The most famous surname in motor racing is Schumacher. Michael is probably the greatest racing driver of all time. He won seven world titles, including five in a row with Ferrari between 2000 and 2004. His dominance was so extreme that some fans lost interest in the sport because a Schumacher win was too predictable. For five years, he was as untouchable as any athlete has ever been. His name is mentioned alongside the likes of Muhammad Ali, Pelé, Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, and no one disputes his right to be there. Yet he came from relatively humble beginnings.

His father Rolf was a bricklayer by trade but also helped run the local go-kart track, where his mother Elisabeth worked in the canteen. Toddler Michael used to ride his pedal go-kart around when he was too young to drive on the track. Seeing his son’s desperation to race for real, Rolf fitted a small motorcycle engine to the pedal kart and let him take it around the track’s car park. Michael promptly crashed into a lamppost. Rolf’s second attempt to harness his enthusiasm was more considered, signing him up as the youngest member of the karting club at Kart-Club Kerpen-Manheim.

The circuit, Germany’s largest at the time, was already attracting big names, hosting the European Kart Championship in which Ayrton Senna raced in 1981 and the Junior World Championship two years later.

Without the kind of connections that others might have to pay for racing equipment for his four-year-old son, Rolf knocked something together from spare parts and cast-offs at the track. However hacky the build – the chassis was too long for the youngster, so Rolf had to cut it down – Michael made it work. He won his first club championship at the age of six and showed such prodigious talent that several wealthy backers around Karpen, already by then a place of some repute in the karting world, took an interest. When he was ten years old, local businessman and family friend Jürgen Dilk, who had made his money in the slot-machine business, paid for a new engine on his go-kart and continued to support him through the ranks. He even helped drive Schumacher around the country to kart races, but the financial pressures were still huge. Michael worked after school to raise funds and scoured rubbish tips for usable tyres. It was Dilk who convinced him, financially and conceptually, to devote himself to driving, but he still got a job as a mechanic to ensure he would not be without income. It was not until he moved up into single-seater racing at the age of nineteen that he really became a full-time driver. Schumacher came up the hard way.

Schumacher made it because nothing could repress his level of dedication and talent, but without wanting to take anything away from those with greater pedigree who also reached the top, F1 is not a true meritocracy. Talent, nerve and speed are important in getting you to the top of the game, but so are sponsorship, connections and luck. Having a name such as Rosberg or Fittipaldi will always open a few more doors, while twelve-year-old Damon Hill knew more racing drivers than most team principals by virtue of his father’s propensity for hosting glamorous parties for his colleagues – and invariably their entourages too. In horse racing, you will hear commentators congratulate the winner’s ‘connections’. It is a classically British euphemism for those who have stumped up the cash to keep the operation going.

George Russell had few connections growing up, but like many of the athletes above, he did have an older sibling and the parental support required to succeed. The Russell association with racing goes back a long way, albeit in a more tangential manner than the Fitipaldis, for example, although it does start with a grandfather figure, his mother Allison’s father, who ‘always liked speed’.

‘He always had quite nice cars back in the day,’ Russell remembers. ‘When he was alive, he would always tell me stories about driving excessively fast on the roads.’

Did Russell’s obsession with speed begin with sitting on his grandfather’s knee, hearing about him zipping around the local A-roads? Quite possibly, but there was an even closer family link that probably played a more significant role in getting petrol into George’s bloodstream.

His brother Benjy had got hooked on go-karting at a birthday party when he was eleven. He loved it from the first moment and he found a willing helper in his father Steve, who had also given the sport a go in his younger days. They started to race regularly, and before they bought their own, organisers at the local track always gave Benjy the rental kart No. 63, the race number that George eventually took on as his own and still races under today.

The 1990s were a good time for a youngster to catch the motor-sport bug in Britain. Damon Hill won the World Drivers’ Championship in 1996 and Williams were the dominant force, winning five World Constructors’ Championships between 1992 and 1997. David Coulthard, Johnny Herbert, Eddie Irvine, Mark Blundell and Martin Brundle were all flying the Union Flag in the paddock too, and by 1998, the majority of the teams on the grid were based in either Britain or Ireland.

British speed in motor sport was born much earlier, although Britain was not the first country to dominate. The first eight F1 world titles, starting in 1950, were won by Italian drivers – Giuseppe Farina and Alberto Ascari – or Juan Manuel Fangio, an Argentinian son of Italian immigrants. Ascari made Ferrari famous while Farina and Fangio both started in Alfa Romeos. The latter also raced in a Maserati, another Italian marque, before claiming the first world title for a team based outside Italy when driving for Mercedes-Benz.

Despite no official Constructors’ trophy being awarded in the 1950s, the presence at the front of the grid of German and Italian teams, Axis powers in a global war that had ended scarcely a decade before, had not gone unnoticed in Great Britain.

It was brought into particularly sharp focus when Stirling Moss joined Mercedes-Benz for the 1955 season, having been let down by his Maserati on multiple occasions after impressing in the early stages of races.

Moss’ move was not seen through the lens of war – it would have been easy to make the argument that he was now benefiting from the engineering skills of those who had built the very machines, directly or indirectly, used to kill Allied soldiers – but as an affront to British exceptionalism.

The Germans had long realised the value of the sport. Before the Second World War, Adolf Hitler had hoped that a team such as Mercedes taking part in these showpiece events (the F1 championship did not exist in a recognisable form at that time but the motor races that would eventually make up the calendar did) could sell Nazi engineering to the world: it was almost an early form of sportswashing. When they bagged a British driver in Dick Seaman, Hitler himself is said to have approved the deal, and it was seen as a great personal coup. It worked too – Seaman moved to Germany, married a German girl (the daughter of BMW’s boss, no less), spoke the language and wrote glowing letters home about Hitler’s no-nonsense approach to hard work and getting the country back on its feet. Newsreel footage of his triumphs showed bands playing both German and British national anthems, and would end with pictures of Seaman, Hitler and King George VI alongside each other.

As time went on, the reality of Nazism clearly began to bite and when Seaman won the 1938 German Grand Prix for Mercedes-Benz, he reluctantly and unavoidably joined the straight-armed salute, although his limp wrist and somewhat bent elbow betrayed his heart was not in it.

Richard Williams’ A Race With Love and Death: The Story of Britain’s First Great Grand Prix Hero charts his life in far greater detail, even noting that Hitler sent an enormous wreath bearing the Nazi eagle to Seaman’s funeral in June 1939 after the driver was killed in a crash at the Belgian Grand Prix. Suffice to say that the memory of his experiences certainly bubbled up when Moss followed his footsteps to Germany a few years later.

An editorial edict from motoring magazine Autosport summed up the frustrations of the British racing community:

‘If there is any blame to be laid then it will fall on the British motor industry, who by their continued apathy to the importance of full-scale Grand Prix racing have virtually forced our best drivers to seek their fortunes with foreign products. In the case of Moss, the foreign country is one whose cars are presenting a real challenge to the British industry, judging by the number of cars now to be seen in England.’

It would seem that Hitler’s plan for industrial dominance had worked. He may have been long dead, the war lost and the empire of evil he tried to build finished, but the British were buying German cars. The Mercedes of Fangio and Moss was sturdy and speedy, more reliable than the Italian counterparts it had started to outstrip and it was innovative too. It was mid-engined, giving the car more stability and comfort through corners, which sparked the eventual move, driven by British innovation this time, to rear-engined race cars. Eventually, the front-engined Italian carmakers followed suit with their designs, but it took them some years for them to catch up. The Mercedes was also not as aesthetically pleasing, but it was quicker, all that truly mattered.

Moss was glad to be part of a cash-rich team, but he was also delighted to be in a dream team line-up with Fangio, a driver Lewis Hamilton has called the ‘Godfather’ of F1. He won five world titles in total and did so with four different teams. Moss firmly believed Fangio was the greatest driver in the world, probably ever, and as a much younger man, relished learning from him up close. It’s not a stretch to make the comparison between his relationship with Fangio and the one that Russell would build with Hamilton some half a century later, although the age gap between the latter is just thirteen years, whereas Moss was some eighteen years Fangio’s junior.

Nevertheless, Moss is widely regarded as the best racing driver never to win a world title. He won sixteen Grands Prix and finished on the podium another eight times, but never finished top of the pile at the end of the year. Three times he finished second to Fangio, once as his teammate, and he was beaten by Mike Hawthorn to the title in 1958 after Fangio retired.

Aside from Hawthorn’s triumph, Moss was the most successful British driver of the 1950s, but he did not win a Grand Prix in a British car until 1957, when he triumphed at Aintree, in front of packed crowds, as motor racing started to take root in Britain on the back of a British victory (Ron Flockhart and Ivor Bueb) in the famous Le Mans 24-hour race.

Moss had been offered a number of European drives for the 1957 British Grand Prix but instead opted to drive a British car on home soil, one built by Tony Vandervell, an industrialist who made a fortune before the war manufacturing bearings. His Vanwall team, which became an early home to Lotus visionary Colin Chapman, among others, had initially run modified Ferraris but were by then building their own cars entirely in their Acton factory. Moss driving for them was big news and he set the fastest lap in qualifying. However, a fuel issue 22 laps into the 90-lap race saw him pull over and, while it was fixed, he jumped in the other Vanwall car, swapping with Tony Brooks. The swap had been pre-arranged, due to a Le Mans crash that he had barely survived a month earlier. In the grainy TV footage from Aintree, you can see the crew pulling Brooks from the car, barely able to hold his own head up after the exertions. Moss continued in ninth but gradually picked off his competitors to claim a historic British Grand Prix victory. In fact, the points were shared between himself and Brooks, but Moss was the only name anyone remembered and having achieved the same two years earlier in a Mercedes, there was no question which victory Moss held more dear.

Victory was as important to Moss as to any racing driver, but as so many obituaries noted when he sadly died in 2020, he wanted to win the right way. Hawthorn won the title in 1958 in no small part because Moss petitioned the stewards not to disqualify him from the Portuguese Grand Prix. He was reinstated and earned six points for finishing second. Hawthorn ended up beating Moss to the title by a single point. Similarly, Moss wanted to win for Britain when he could. That the colour of the Vanwall he was driving when he won at Aintree was British racing green was a nod to the fighter planes that had won the war. His one-year stint at Mercedes was driven by admiration for Fangio, rather than by any love of German engineering. He spent most years after that driving privateer Lotuses or Coopers, even though there were faster cars out there that would surely have carried him to a title.

Nevertheless, Moss was revered in Britain for that loyalty and blazed a trail that was followed 70 years later when the great Mercedes-Benz hired another British driver alongside Lewis Hamilton in George Russell. The comparisons often made between Hamilton and Moss carry no great merit – they competed in different sports in completely different eras – but neither Hamilton nor Russell can deny that their racing journeys owe much to Moss.

Stirling Moss’ successes begat much more British success, even in the short term. Starting with Hawthorn in 1958, British drivers won nine of the next sixteen world titles, and between 1962 and 1965 it was the Union Flag that topped the podium at the end of the season. More often than not, there was a Brit on the next two steps down as well. Graham Hill, Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart and John Surtees were all firmly installed at the top of the racing game, while British teams such as Lotus, BRM and Brabham were only occasionally beaten by Ferrari in the Constructors’ standings. Even when Australian Jack Brabham won back-to-back titles in 1959 and 1960, it was in the revolutionary rear-engined Cooper, built in a small Surrey factory by Charlie Cooper and his son John. It was those two who gave the team and the car, the predecessor of the Mini Cooper, their name. Britain, a country that had led the Allies to victory in the Second World War, was starting to apply the brains and brawn that had built the Spitfire to motor racing. And it was working.

George Russell’s father Steve was born in 1955, the year Stirling Moss had won his first Grand Prix. While Steve was not necessarily a motor-racing fanatic growing up, he was part of a generation that fostered many of them. When F1 results regularly read Hill–Clark–Surtees–Stewart or some combination of those names, cohorts of youngsters were tearing around the streets of Britain imitating them.

Steve’s oldest son Benjy was about to start senior school at nearby Spalding Grammar when he went to a friend’s birthday party at a go-kart track not far from the family home. Benjy jumped into the No. 63 go-kart that was randomly assigned to him and from the first corner, loved every second. It quickly went from activity to hobby to ambition. The eleven-year-old’s apparent aptitude and Steve’s keenness to learn as an engineer, as well as the family’s relatively comfortable financial situation, created a rapid gradient for improvement.

Benjy’s first national title came four years later in the Super 1 Junior TKM Intermediates. Victory got the Russell family thinking they might be on to something, although the step-up to seniors – enforced at sixteen when Benjy was too heavy to continue in juniors – made things inevitably tougher. There were academic matters to be considered too; Benjy was good enough at maths to earn a place at Loughborough University, despite being more interested in apexes than indices. Before he finished school, he started travelling into mainland Europe and of course Italy, that Mecca of go-kart racing, to take on bigger and better foes. Again, the Russells found themselves on a steep learning curve.

It was a learning curve at home too. By the time Benjy was getting ready to leave school, George was six and starting to take significant interest in his brother’s hobby. The family had always travelled as a unit in some shape or form, even if sometimes it was two units. Even when George was a baby, Steve and Benjy would head off in one direction at the weekend to a race while Allison would pack the pram and Cara, a year older than Benjy, into the car and head off around the country for elite-level horse competitions. By the time George was two, Cara was a national champion on horseback but, like her brother, had academics to worry about too; she picked up A-levels in law, chemistry and biology before later studying business management at Oxford Brookes. She would go on to work for the family peas and beans business and then get involved with racing, working for the go-karting team that George raced for and then the all-female single-seater W Series as a partnership and driver liaison manager, before eventually helping to manage her brother’s affairs. She has probably seen George race more times than anyone else.