Mercedes left in dark over reason for George Russell’s W16 issues

Mercedes are still unclear as to what exactly happened to George Russell’s F1 car during the Bahrain Grand Prix.

Russell turned in a brilliant drive to claim second place behind McLaren’s Oscar Piastri in Sunday's race despite suffering from a plethora of electrical gremlins which caused Mercedes’ systems to go awry.

The Briton lost brake-by-wire in his W16 and experienced transponder issues which saw him repeatedly vanish from the timing screens. This also impacted his automatic DRS activation system.

At one point Russell incorrectly activated his DRS which led to a post-race investigation, but he escaped punishment having immediately backed off the throttle in order to close the flap.

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff admitted he is unsure whether the fault was theirs or an issue on Formula One Management’s end.

"It has happened before back in 2018," Wolff explained to media after the race.

"There have been examples of needing to manually override and inadvertently opening being no further action. It doesn't mean that's the case here, but there are precedents for it.

“It opened and closed. There wasn’t any benefit. The system failed and we hope it will be alright.

"We don't know the [cause] yet. Maybe some wiring looms in the car, or maybe it was triggered by the F1 system failure and it caused our system to go bananas."

Mercedes hail ‘unbelievable’ George Russell drive

Wolff was left impressed by Russell’s ability to fend off the faster McLaren of Lando Norris to secure P2 while contending with a multitude of issues inside his cockpit.

"The brake-by-wire failed suddenly, and then it took a while to find the settings to kind of reset it,” he said.

“But we did that, and then, to be honest, him managing the system coming in and out while having Norris behind him. It's just an unbelievable drive, to be honest.

"What he did today. He secured this podium on top of that. Taking the soft for such a long time was also created between managing and then attacking when he needed to.

“And I think it's probably whoever, if you haven't driven a race car that has a BBW or conventional brake, it's like on a road car when the power assisted steering fails.

"And then imagine you have to adjust between one corner having it and the next one not having it, that was just a very good skill.”

Wolff confirmed that Russell lost brake-by-wire, GPS, on-board and DRS.

“I think on the dash we didn't have all the things that we expected,” he added.

“We also feared that we would lose the whole dash, which would have meant no buttons, no ways to run any of the settings and obviously he had it in the shift lights, and he had it in the back of his mind and it didn't take his concentration away.”