F1 king of cool: why George Russell always had winning hand in Vegas

At the 2024 Las Vegas Grand Prix Max Verstappen clinched his fourth straight world title with a low-key drive to fifth place in his Red Bull. Given that his only title rival Lando Norris was always behind him, his McLaren with no great pace, it was enough.

George Russell meanwhile completely dominated the race from pole and his Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton finished just a few seconds behind him despite having started only 10th after two crucial mistakes in qualifying the day before.

There was a brief moment on the fourth lap where Charles Leclerc almost got his Ferrari ahead of Russell and Scuderia team boss Frederic Vasseur said if that move had succeeded the outcome of the race would have been different. But even he probably doesn’t really believe that, such was the pace advantage of Mercedes. On the same two-stop strategy Russell finished over 14sec ahead of the lead Ferrari of Carlos Sainz in third. That was with Russell in tyre management mode for most of the race. The gap might easily have been double that, if we look at Hamilton’s recovery drive to see how fast a Merc could have been driven. Had Leclerc made the move stick to take an early lead, it would surely only have led to a different route to the same outcome. The Merc was hugely faster and if Russell hadn’t been able to thwart the Ferrari’s strong end-of-straight speed to pass on track, he’d inevitably have used the Merc’s pace and its ability to switch its tyres on way faster to have passed around the pitstops.

So, what was behind this unusual competitive order?

Mercedes

Now that the season’s almost over, Mercedes is being a little more forthcoming about the nature of the W15’s limitations. Russell explained it very well here. “We struggle on bumps. When the track is bumpy we have to lift the car and go softer on the suspension. Certain circuits require us to be in a [ride height] window the car doesn’t like to be. But on smooth circuits like this, where we can run it low and stiff, we fly.”

Smooth in texture and in contours, the Las Vegas street track offers up very little grip, especially on a cold desert night where the track temperature hovered between 10-17C all weekend. With such a surface, any car which can generate good tyre temperature will be inordinately well-rewarded. That again is the Mercedes. Recall that it was also super-quick at the three other cold races this year – Montreal, Silverstone and Spa.

So with its aero in a happy place coinciding with a big reward for putting a lot of energy into the front tyres (probably partly on account of that stiff suspension), it was a double hit. The quick tyre warm-up helped Russell to pole, gaining him 0.3sec to the Ferrari in the first sector, only 0.2sec of which Sainz was able to claw back in the rest of the lap. Hamilton aided Russell’s cause by going off track on both his Q3 runs, leaving him P10 on the grid. Up until that time he’d been vying with Russell as the fastest.

Then there was how its rear wing was a much better fit for the demands of the track than those used by (especially) Red Bull but also Ferrari. Its better combination of drag and downforce made it faster down the straights than the Red Bull and with much better traction than the Ferrari – and that advantage just accumulated in tyre usage through the race. Cold graining of the right-front was the limiting factor for everyone. But the Merc’s tyres weren’t running as cold and their surface was getting a bit more protection from the downforce.

It all made for as dominant performance as any delivered early season by Red Bull or mid-season by McLaren.

The Rest

Like Mercedes and unlike Red Bull, Ferrari made a specific Monza wing. But it was even more extreme in drag-shedding than that of the Mercedes. It worked perfectly at Monza. For Vegas, it was a little too extreme, losing more time through Turns 3-4 and 5-6 than it could gain on the long back straight. The difference in qualifying was small and if the Ferrari had been able to generate tyre temperature as quickly as the Mercedes, it would likely have been a pole car. But the difference in the race was much bigger, given that the graining front limitation everyone faced needed as much help as possible from downforce.

Where a team pitches its range of rear wings is decided at the conception stage of the car. Monza has long been an outlier in that the ideal drag/downforce trade-off has always been way more extreme than anywhere else. It costs a lot of resource to create a wing – the computation and the design are incredibly intricate and soak up time, money and capacity. In the cost cap era, and with a bigger restriction than anyone else on wind tunnel time, it was an easy saving for Red Bull not to bother with a Monza wing and redeploy the saved resource to where it might offer more reward over a season. In the past couple of years Red Bull has had such a car advantage it could afford to sacrifice a Monza wing and still win there with a trimmed version of its Spa-level wing. That won’t have been as efficient as a specifically-designed Monza wing, but it would do.

But a couple of things have changed: Red Bull no longer has that advantage and Vegas now demands close to Monza levels of low drag. So it caught Red Bull and Verstappen out this weekend. With a crudely cut Spa-style wing, Verstappen qualified and raced to fifth, ignoring any temptations to engage in battle with Hamilton or the Ferrari drivers when he had the opportunity. All he needed to do was beat Norris. Which he did comfortably.

McLaren reduced its wing level from the first day of practice, but it’s not a car seen to its best on low downforce tracks. It’s especially not at its best on a cold low-downforce track. On a hot track its tyre advantage will usually be enough to override its low-drag limitations. But Vegas was the worst of all worlds for the MCL38. Neither Norris nor Oscar Piastri could get a decent tune from it.

Alpine has a very good Monza wing – and the car is pretty good at generating tyre temperature too. Pierre Gasly delivered a beautiful lap on Saturday to qualify it third, ran an early fourth but retired early with a blown engine. Which in constructors’ championship terms was unfortunate as it battles for sixth place with Haas and RB, which scored eighth and ninth place points respectively courtesy of Nico Hulkenberg and Yuki Tsunoda.