Russell: By far our weakest race of the year

Russell must have been relieved when the Mercedes pit wall told him they were retiring the car after the nightmare of a race he was enduring at the venue where he won his first ever Formula 1 race in 2022.

Mercedes simply couldn't get their W14 to work, and Russell was relegated to a moaning role, from the moment he found himself looking at the rear wing of Lewis Hamilton always asking for team orders to go through, especially as Carlos Sainz started attacking them.

No team orders would've made any difference, and in the end, Sao Paulo for Russell was a case of "what a difference a year makes", something the driver himself admitted after the race.

"12 months ago this was our strongest race of the year, 12 months later it’s by far our weakest race of the year, so very strange," he told Sky Sports F1.

Later in Mercedes' team report, Russell said: "We obviously got something very wrong this weekend. We're not sure what that was yet but the pace just hasn't been there.

"You clearly don't go from a podium-worthy car to one that is one second off the front, so it's been very strange. We thought yesterday may have been a one off, but it clearly wasn't," he added referring to his struggles in the Sprint race.

"We were sliding the tyres and I think the performance we showed was the maximum we had with the car the way it was. In the end, we were suffering from high oil temperatures in the Power Unit and that caused us to retire. That topped off what was a difficult day.

"We need to now get back to the factory, regroup, and work through what we did to get on top of it before the final two races of the season," the winner of the 2022 Sao Paulo Grand Prix concluded.

While Hamilton managed to finish the race in Sao Paulo on Sunday, the seven-time F1 Champion taking the chequered flag in eighth, even beaten by the Alpine of Pierre Gasly.