According to George Russell, McLaren has a bigger advantage than Red Bull has ever had, to the point where they could win every race, but it won’t happen.
The McLaren of 2025 is more dominant than Red Bull has ever been. At least, that’s what George Russell told the media ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix. The Mercedes driver is no stranger to making such predictions and rarely gets them wrong. After the first race of 2023, he said, “Red Bull should win every race,” and the season ended with 21 wins out of 22 for Verstappen and Perez’s team.
After the opening round in Australia, Russell made another bold prediction, forecasting an even greater McLaren dominance compared to Red Bull in recent years. Despite this, the number 63 believes that Norris and Piastri won’t be able to take full advantage of the opportunity like Verstappen did.
“I think their car is definitely capable of winning every race,” explained Russell, who had already dropped the bombshell in Australia, stating that McLaren’s advantage is so significant that the team could already focus entirely on the developments for 2026.
“They should win every race, but I don’t think it will happen. The advantage they have this year is greater than anything Red Bull has ever had.” Red Bull in 2023 was about 3/4 tenths ahead of everyone, while McLaren is definitely even further ahead. Max, however, was always reliable. This year, we hope to take advantage of some of their mistakes, as we did in Melbourne: that should have been a 1-2 for them. “.
When talking about the strengths and weaknesses of the MCL39, Russell said: “They are clearly working better than everyone else with the tires, especially when they get very hot. We saw it in the Bahrain tests and we saw it again in the third sector in Melbourne during qualifying, where they were 4 tenths faster than the others.” .
“However, they could struggle with the cold. They clearly seem better than everyone else at cooling the tires. We saw it last year in Singapore and Zandvoort, two very hot circuits where they were clearly ahead of the others, while in Las Vegas they were nowhere. But I’m sure they will know how to react.” .
The responses from the paddock didn’t take long to arrive. “I can’t respond accurately because I can’t know the exact advantage unless I’ve driven their car. But I agree that McLaren is clearly ahead of everyone else right now.” Verstappen said.
Piastri, on the other hand, called Russell’s words exaggerated. “George has had some funny ideas over the last couple of weeks. We’ll see, it’s just one race, it’s a track that has been competitive for us in recent years. We will definitely go to tracks where we will have more difficulties. If he wants to write off his season after the first weekend, I’ll let him do that, but we are very aware that Melbourne was an exceptional weekend, more than what we expect to become the norm.” .
Photo: McLaren, Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team
