George Russell makes bold Red Bull prediction following F1 season opener

George Russell believes that Red Bull have already won this year’s Formula One championship and are capable of winning every race in 2023.

This comes after Sunday’s season opening Bahrain Grand Prix in which Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez locked out the front row in qualifying before cruising to a 1-2 finish in the race.

No team could match the sheer speed of the Red Bulls, with Aston Martin, Mercedes and Ferrari instead engaging in an entertaining battle to be best of the rest in Sakhir.

Russell finished in seventh place, over 55 seconds behind Verstappen, and after the race, the British driver, alongside his Mercedes boss Toto Woff, cut a despondent figure, bemoaning that he and team had a lot of work to do to get the W14 up to the level of the RB19.

And while teammate Sir Lewis Hamilton remained somewhat upbeat, Russell doubled down on his pessimism, making a rather chilling prediction about the outcome of this year’s title race.

‘Red Bull have got this championship sewn up and I don’t think anybody will be fighting with them this year,’ the 25-year-old said.

‘They should win every single race this season. With the performance they have got I don’t see anyone challenging them. They have got it easy at the moment, and they can do what they like.

‘They might not take every pole – because Ferrari are competitive over one lap – but when it comes to race pace, they are in a very strong position.’

After pre-season testing it was expected that Red Bull would be the team to beat, but the size of the gap to the rest of field is unprecedented, with second-placed Perez finishing around 27 seconds ahead of third-placed Fernando Alonso.

Mercedes were way off the pace at the start of 2022 as well, with their radical zero side-pods design proving to be more of a hinderance than a help but it was decided that they would persevere with the concept as they believed it would eventually become competitive with upgrades.

But after conceding that they had slipped further behind in 2023, Wolff announced ahead of the race that they would be moving in a different direction, saying: ‘I don’t think that this package is going to be competitive eventually.

‘We gave it our best go over the winter and now we all just need to regroup, sit down with the engineers, be totally non-dogmatic and ask what is the development direction we want to pursue in order to be able to win races.

‘We hit our targets. That’s why I say we gave it our best shot. But the moment comes when the stopwatch comes out and that showed us that we are not good enough.

‘At this team we blame the problem not the person. I have responsibilities. I need to fire myself if I want to do something.

‘We got it wrong last year. We thought we could fix it by sticking to the concept of car but it didn’t work out. So we just need to switch our focus on to what we believe is the right direction.’

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