Russell: 'Calling our season a failure is far from reality'

Friends and foes agree that Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing are the big favourites for the Dutch Grand Prix too. But in the expected rain, for example, things could just go anything but smoothly for the championship leader on Sunday. A slide on a wet track is easily made. Should Verstappen fail to take victory for some reason, Mercedes expects to be the team that takes full advantage.

"Yes absolutely," said George Russell. "I feel like as a team we've gone strength to strength this season and obviously there's a lot of expectations upon us going into the season and perhaps why people are calling our season a bit of a failure and of course it's far from where we wanted to be because we want to be fighting for championships but to call P2 in the championship, 50 points ahead of P3 at the moment, a failure is far from reality."

Russell realises there is still much to improve. "I think going into the second half of the season we can be there to hopefully pick up any pieces that fall our way but we just never know. I think last year we had the mentality that Singapore would probably be our only opportunity in the second half to win a race and when we didn't win in Singapore there was a bit of disappointment and there was sort of no expectation to go into Brazil and we came away with the victory there so we'll treat every race as an opportunity."

Being tempted to say that Mercedes has the second-fastest car is something Russell does not do, by the way. "It's really close between us, Aston Martin and between the Ferrari and McLaren at the moment. I think we're probably the ones that are consistently there fighting between the second and third fastest team but the team have done a really great job to to maximise the points and as I said delivering week in week out so I'm not going to sit here and say we are the second fastest team, I'm not too sure but I think we're in a really strong position to secure that P2."