George Russell has been told he will never be a Formula One world champion. This season was his best chance yet as finally, after years of waiting while Mercedes struggled to compete at the very sharp end of the grid, the Silver Arrows built a car and engine which is going to be confirmed as the cream of the crop this year. However, he is not the one who is on the cusp of steering it to personal glory.
Mercedes closing in on constructors' title
Mercedes are 134 points clear of nearest challengers Ferrari with, at most, six rounds remaining. Barring a spectacular collapse, they are going to be named constructors' champions for the first time since 2021 and Russell has, undoubtedly, played a key role in that.
But while the teams' title is where the prize money is won, all the prestige is carried by the drivers' championship. Every young racer grows up dreaming of becoming world champion and, with Mercedes the class of the field, this was supposed to be Russell's year.
Antonelli outshines Russell
He has, however, been outshone by junior team-mate Kimi Antonelli. While Russell won the first race of the season, Antonelli threw down the gauntlet at the Brit's feet with five wins in a row when he was still only 19 years old, and Russell simply hasn't been able to respond.
Antonelli has since added three more victories to take his tally for the year up to eight, while Russell's win in Baku last month was just his third Grand Prix success in 2026. As a result, he is 102 points adrift of his team-mate – a mountain simply far too big to climb at this stage of the season.
Readers doubt Russell's title credentials
Of course, next year the scores will reset and Russell will have another chance to go for glory. But there is no guarantee that Mercedes will have the performance advantage that they started the current season with, especially if Max Verstappen can build on the momentum he currently has in his upgraded Red Bull.
In a poll, readers were asked if Russell will win the Formula One title in his career. In total, 1,484 responded and nearly three-quarters of you said 'no'. Seventy-four percent, 1,092 of all those who took part in the poll, said they think Russell will eventually retire from F1 without having won its ultimate prize. Only 26 percent, 392 of you, still have faith that Russell can become world champion.
But it won't happen this season with Antonelli able to mathematically get it done as early as the next race in Austin, if the result goes his way. He will have to end the weekend 125 points clear of Russell, and so he will need to win and hope the Brit scores no more than two points at the Circuit of the Americas.
Engine penalties loom for Russell
Even if Russell can keep the title battle theoretically alive beyond their trip to Texas, he knows he still has the pain of another set of engine penalties to come. After his power unit gave up towards the end of the Bahrain Grand Prix of Malaysia earlier this month, he was forced to fit new parts taking him beyond his annual allocation in Singapore, and confirmed he will have to add more to his pool to get to the end of the year.
Russell said: "I knew I was going to have a penalty. The plan was always to go in Austin, and obviously Singapore is the second hardest track to overtake on on the calendars. So you would never choose to do it [here]. But we have no engines because of all of the various failures, so there was no engine I could have reverted to from earlier in the season. With this failure, I had to take it."
"We don't have the [upgrade] this weekend, and because there are seven races remaining, you can either choose to roll the dice and hope it lasts for seven races, but also suffer a performance offset [as the engine degrades], or just accept I'll be taking another penalty."
Russell later confirmed he is likely to take that pain in Las Vegas next month, one of the more overtake-friendly circuits remaining.
