George Russell says he's not playing mind games when praising Ferrari & McLaren

George Russell has said that he ‘can’t be bothered with mind games’ after the first week of Formula 1 testing last week, with many drivers playing down their chances and praising other teams in Barcelona.

It’s that time of the year where testing is underway and with the new cars coming into the sport for 2022, it’s an important period for the drivers to get to grips with completely different machinery.

Indeed, it’s also a good chance for teams to see just how their new car is faring and to see what other teams have done, with several different designs unveiled over the last few weeks.

That all said, you can only read so much into testing performance before an actual Formula 1 season starts and that is the case again here, though Russell has said that Ferrari and McLaren are looking good.

It was put to him, then, that that might by mind games in putting pressure on potential opposition for Mercedes for the new season, but the Briton said he simply cannot be bothered with such psychological warfare:

“I can’t be bothered with mind games, it’s too much effort. No, there are no mind games.

“We’re just working on our own programme and, to be honest, it is absolutely unrepresentative what we’ve seen during testing.

“You know who is probably in the top half, and you know who’s in the bottom half, but when it comes to qualifying you’ve got tenths of a second splits between [teams], which is the equivalent of five kilos worth of fuel. So yeah, [it’s] totally unrepresentative.

“Things will probably look very different with the development by the time we get to Bahrain. Maybe Lando is playing mind games, but we’re not!”

In fairness to George, he’s not the sort of person to do anything else but play things rather straight and so he