George Russell has not yet signed a new contract with his Mercedes-AMG F1 team for the 2026 season. It seems team boss and “F1 The Movie” producer Toto Wolff is trying to keep his team’s options open for next season, actively attempting to lure the four-time World Drivers’ Champion Max Verstappen away from his recalcitrant Red Bull Racing team. “As Mercedes, they want to be back on top, and if you’re going to be back on top you need to make sure you’ve got the best drivers, the best engineers, the best pitcrew, and that’s what Mercedes are chasing. So, it’s only normal that conversations with the likes of Verstappen are ongoing,” Russell admitted to Motorsport.com ahead of this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix. Russell, having won four Grands Prix for the three-pointed star since he joined the team in 2022, including the most recent outing at the Canadian Grand Prix, is confident his performance will earn him a new contract in short order.
With an entirely new set of regulations on the horizon, Mercedes will want to hit the ground running in 2026 with a solid lineup of adaptable drivers. Because of that, I think the team would be foolish to drop George for Verstappen. When everything is perfect for Max and he has the exact right car, the Red Bull ace is nearly unstoppable. Face him with even the lightest of adverse conditions, and he implodes into an atomic bomb of insecurity and dangerous on-track antics. If Mercedes build a mildly competitive car, as they have this season, George will unequivocally be the right answer, and I’m confident he’s got enough talent to take a championship if the car is as well-built as the 2025 McLarens or 2023 Red Bull have been. Max might be able to make a perfect car even more perfect, but in a merely passable car he’ll be a liability for the team, as he has been in 2025.
What if George isn’t the one to go?
Conveniently the Mercedes AMG F1 team has two seats, so George doesn’t necessarily have to be the one to go in order to make room for Mr. Verstappen. In that same interview, propped up by his recent win, Russell commented “I feel with the performance I’m showing at the moment I’ve got zero reasons to be worried.” That leaves Mercedes-AMG junior driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli on the chopping block. The 18-year-old recent grad joined Mercedes for the 2025 season on a one-year contract to replace Sir Lewis Hamilton, who departed for Ferrari after delivering 8 World Constructor Championships for the Merc squad. Antonelli is holding his own, but hardly filling those big shoes, scoring fewer than half as many points as Russell across the season.
If I were Toto Wolff, and thank goodness I’m not, I certainly would not ditch either of these drivers to woo Max Verstappen. In spite of Max’s generational talent, he’s a potential liability to the team if he replaces Russell, and the team would practically implode if he replaced Antonelli. A George Russell and Max Verstappen duo at Mercedes would be diabolical and the infighting would break even the most stoic team principal.
