Russell unexpectedly beat Hamilton in his first year at Mercedes and is already 3-0 up in this year’s qualifying head-to-heads, though a retirement at the Australian Grand Prix has left him 20 points behind the seven-time world champion in the 168澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果历史:drivers’ standings. 

As the closely-fought intra-team battleཧ at Mercede🐻s heats up, the relationship between the British duo is being observed and scrutinised extremely closely. 

And FIA press conference and F1 Nation podcast host Tom Clarkson has floated the idea that 🦂Hamilton might be attempting to lull his you🤪nger teammate into a false sense of security. 

“In the press conferen⭕ce [in Australia], after qualifying, they’d qualified second and third in Melbourne. Max, of course on pole,” Clarkson said on the latest episode of the F1 Nation podcast.

“And every time a question was posed to both of the Mercedes drivers, Lewis was quite happy for George to a൲nswer the question.

“He almost bec♓ame the spokesperson for the team in that press conference. And I was interested as to why Lewis was happy to just sit back and let that happen. I don’t know whether he’s sort of keeping his powder dry.

“Is he trying to sort of give him a sort of false hope of being the dominant person, and then he’s going to really hit him hard where it matters most on the stopwatch later﷽ on?

“I don’t know what his thought process was. But it was interesting anyway, to observe that he very much let Ge🍃orge be tไhe man.”

Asked for his take on the fascinating dynamic between the Mercedes teammates, 1996 world champion168澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果历史: Damon Hill said: “We [drivers] are competitive.

“And 𓆏we are kind of political as well. You have to be aware of ris𒁏ing forces or rising empires within the team. George has to make himself a valued asset of the team. And he’s obviously doing that really well.

“But at the same time, he’s the one that has to do all the har🍬d work. I think Lewis doesn’t have to. They [Mercedes] know what they’ve got with Lewis, and they know that given half a sniff of a chance, he’s going to be back on on top form and can deliver those extraordina♊ry races.

“They know that George can do that too. Bu♕t he has yet to prove all that.

“So I think Lewis is very good and will suss all this out and then he’ll be sitting there thinking ‘well, okay, I’ll letꦐ you do all the hard work, George, because it’s exhausting doing all this’.

“George is also the director of GPDA so he’s got a big workload, George, he’s taken🍌 on quite a lot.

“But I think Lewis’ strategy has always been to remove as many distractions as possible and leave time for downtime and cla♊rity.”