George Russell said missing out on what he felt should have been a first Formula 1 points finish in the Tuscan Grand Prix was “ꦰheartbreaking”.

Mugello delivered a thrilling, incident-filled✱ race on F1’s first ever competitive visit to Tuscany and Russell looked to be in a strong position to capitalise on the chaos and score Williams’ first points haul of the 2020 season.

The Briton sat in ninth place after the second and final red flag period triggered by Lance Stroll’s mass🌱ive shunt, but a poor getaway at the restart cost Russell multiple positions.

Russe🥃ll ultimately fought back to 11th but was unable to beat Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel to claim the final point on offer.

"It is heartbreaking almost," Russel🦩l said. "The whole team had worked so hard, got ourselves in an amazing position P9🍎, and it was well and truly under control and sealed.

"The car was feeling great. ꦍI was matching the pace of Sebastian and Charles behind me on the same life tyre. And that red flag just threw it aꦗll away really.

"We made a really poor start just off the line. We don't know why yet bꦕecause procedural wise everyth🍃ing was spot on.

"Then having Kimi [Raikkonen] and [Romain] Grosjean, they obviously had an extra lap to warm the tyres up and they both made mega🧸, mega launches, which didn't help things.

"Nevertheless, just bitter൲ly disappointing because we deserved it and it should have been ours. Two red flags 🥂in one race is ridiculous."

Russell conceded he had no explanation for why he suffered a poor launch, having practiced the start and clutch drop procedure “꧑100” times without encountering an issue.

“I don’t really know what happened,” he added. “Everything seemed to be on target wi🙈th th🎃e procedures.

“The other starts were okay, nothing special⭕, but that last one with soft tyres I just went into wheelspin and got hit by Kimi and then you can’t do an🍃ything from there. I drove my heart out.

"I sat in the garage 10 minutes before practising my starts🥀 for 10 minutes, and I must have done a total of 100 clutch drops over the course of those two hours. And every time I was within 2-3% of the target, which is normally not an issue at all.

"So we just need to look into it and see what went wrong because to be fair, all of♔ our launches were bad today."