George Russell: A Biography

PROLOGUE

It was not the first time that George Russell had found himself crying into his crash helmet, and it wouldn’t be the last, either. But after all the contrasting emotions of what had been the biggest week of his young life, maybe nothing would hurt as much as this.

The previous hours and days had been a whirlwind, a psychologically and physically testing week the likes of which Russell had never experienced. It started when his phone rang during a 2am trip to the bathroom. It was a call he would probably not have answered had he not blearily noticed the name flashing up in front of him: Toto Wolff. It must have been important – and it was. Lewis Hamilton had tested positive for Covid-19 just four days before the first practice session of the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix in Bahrain, and Russell was top of Wolff’s list of replacements. The team principle of Mercedes would have to convince Williams too, but first of all, he wanted to see if the man he had virtually anointed as Hamilton’s future teammate was up for it. There was no hesitation. Of course he was.

‘Leave it with me,’ Wolff told him, after which he spent the next 24 hours trying to thrash out a deal with Williams to lend him their driver for a week. The Mercedes customer team had already stopped Russell making the move to the Silver Arrows once, activating the one-year option in his contract that would mean he could not replace Valtteri Bottas in 2021. They did not want to do so again, but it was still a business decision and there were many moving parts. Russell’s phone rang almost constantly the following day, more than 60 times in all, but eventually a deal was reached. Sensationally, he would make his Mercedes debut with just a few days’ notice.

It would not be a completely cold start of course. Russell had logged hundreds of hours in the Mercedes simulator and had driven their car on track. But never in a live race. He was almost four inches taller than Hamilton too and had to wear race boots one size too small in order to squeeze into the car. There were adjustments they could make, but they couldn’t rebuild the car for him. Russell would just have to fit.

It was like nothing he had contended with before. Tall for his age just about all his life, Russell’s height had nearly cost him a junior title because he wasn’t able to operate the pedals properly and suffered at starts. Like so often, though, his racing ability saw him through.

And so it was in Sakhir. Despite everything, Russell beat Max Verstappen in the first practice session of the weekend by just under two tenths and logged the most laps of anyone. It helped that Mercedes had been so utterly dominant that season, of course, winning all but one race up to that point, and perhaps it helped that the Sakhir Grand Prix was being held on a newly laid-out Bahrain track, something of an equaliser. But nevertheless, it was not the result anyone expected. Once again Russell had surprised them.

No one could have predicted what would follow either. Russell missed out on pole position by just two hundredths of a second, which even on a short lap that lasted just 53 seconds was still an infinitesimally small margin, to Valtteri Bottas, the man who had been signed up for another year in the very seat Russell coveted and who was determined not to let the Brit make him look bad.

On race day, though, Russell was on course to do exactly that, a young upstart with serious ambitions on debut, outdriving his far more experienced teammate who had driven past him and looked more than comfortable leading the race. But then disaster struck. Mercedes botched a pit stop so badly that Russell had to return to the pits and get the right tyres fitted. In the confusion of a last-minute stop, the team had managed to fit Bottas’ tyres to Russell’s Mercedes, which is not allowed under motor-racing regulations. His double pit stop saw him drop from first to fifth, but with the safety car deployed at the time, it was not game over by any stretch.

But fate, not content with landing one sucker-punch to Russell’s gut, swung for him again. Having brilliantly overtaken Bottas for the second time in the race, he was up to second within four laps. There were still fourteen to go and Sergio Pérez, the surprise leader who had been dead-last at one point, was only 3.5 seconds ahead. Russell’s first win was there for the taking. A first podium was in the bag, surely?

‘Looks like a rear-left puncture,’ Russell’s engineer told him over the radio with eight laps to go. He could scarcely believe it, but there he was again in the pits, and as Pérez crossed for the win a few minutes later, Russell went over in ninth. He was mentally and physically exhausted, and had his balaclava not already been wet through with sweat, it would have been further dampened by his tears. Once he had parked up, he could barely walk back to the Mercedes garage. His legs were cramping and stiff, and he waved off fans hoping for a picture, but before he had even made it to the garage, he dumped himself on a dusty concrete step and put his head in a towel. Someone passed him his water bottle and, with a thousand-yard stare that told you all you needed to know, he wiped his eyes and tried to rehydrate. A few Mercedes team members came up to him and provided consolatory pats on his shoulder, but no words were exchanged.

In that moment, Russell did not know about the tears of happiness that were in his stars: after winning his first points for Williams in Hungary in 2021 and then after earning his first F1 race win in Brazil in 2022. This was a low, and he could only hope that highs would follow. But he could not know for sure that they would. He could only believe.

1

EARLY DAYS

Driving into the sleepy Fenland village of Tydd St Giles, there is a sign that warns you to ‘reduce your speed’. Periodically, it is amusingly vandalised to remove the first and last letter of the final word. But in its original form, it is a stern warning to those who want to treat the flattest part of England as a racetrack.

To perhaps the village’s most famous son, though, it might read as something of a challenge. In George Russell’s line of work, speed is the only thing that matters.

It’s hard to overstate the contrast between the world Russell now inhabits, of sports cars, expensive watches and glamorous photo shoots, and the one in which he grew up, living in the tiny Cambridgeshire hamlet of Tydd St Giles, wedged up against the Lincolnshire border and home to just a few hundred people and precious few children.

There is little reason to have heard of the village before. A man called Mike Ashton made headlines in the 1980s after his local bungalow was subject to a police raid over a tobacco-smuggling operation. Residents still remember the Sunday People double-page investigation, the helicopters overhead and HMRC tearing the bungalow apart searching for evidence. Ashton, who said he had never done anything wrong, was in hiding from gangs involved in a £20 million-a-year racket moving cheap tobacco from Belgium to the UK. Ashton did indeed sell the tobacco, and legally, but denied being involved in the illegal smuggling. Out of fear of the gangs, who thought he was involved and because of threats made to his family, his house was covered in security cameras and police monitored his phone calls. It was a scandal that dominated the papers for several weekends, but it did not live long in the memory much after that, although in the village, it is something of a legendary tale.

A traditional farming community, they don’t need the newspapers – whether it be the Sunday People, the Eastern Daily Press or the Wisbech Standard – to tell them anything they do not already know because not much happens between the asparagus fields without everyone getting to know about it soon enough. This being England, there is a pub, of course – the centre of such gossip. The Crown and Mitre does local beers, some of which have been brewed in this part of the world for hundreds of years, and a steak and ale pie that is the stuff of legend. There is a vintage scooter club that has been meeting there for decades, perhaps the village’s only vague link to motor racing. There is a new microbrewery nearby too – the Tydd Steam Brewery – like much in this part of the world, tucked away behind green hedgerows and algae-covered gates. It is a quiet corner of England, apart from the distant grumble of a tractor or the echoing cluck-and-pop of a shotgun unsuccessfully aimed at a pheasant.

One noisy thing that does exist between the hedges, though, is an obsession with engines and machinery. This could be a result of the fact that East Anglia is only truly habitable through various miraculous feats of engineering by virtue of its marshland status – Tydd St Giles itself has an average altitude of zero metres above sea level and is bordered by the North Level Main Drain, one of the many dead-straight waterways that crisscross the Fenland counties and are crucial to their very existence. For years, diesel engines drove pumping stations that lifted water from the drains into the rivers, ensuring the Fenlands remained dry. At the nearby Tydd Gote pumping station, three enormous green engines pumped tonnes of water into the River Nene until as recently as 2007, when the station was converted to electricity. Even as far back as the Roman occupation of Britain, there were attempts to drain parts of the area, alongside the construction of raised gravel causeways across some of the marshlands. In the 10th century, the Danes built dykes primarily for defensive purposes, but also created higher paths and roads that were later used to move building materials long distances, establishing and then enriching the monasteries that owned much of the land. Before then, the majority of the area from the Wash to Cambridge was unusable swamp.

All of the various societies that ruled over the Fens relied on varying levels of ingenuity to bend the land to the will of man, and while there is now a widespread effort to restore parts of the region to their natural state, this neck of the woods remains one whose very existence is propped up by axles, gears and grease, no matter what the fuel or energy that powers them.

The Fens has birthed some of motor sport’s most recognisable figures too. Bernie Ecclestone, the godfather of modern Formula One, spent the earliest part of his life in St Peter down in Suffolk, albeit in a very different era: born in 1930, he would travel the five miles to his first school on a horse-drawn milk wagon. His family eventually moved to Kent, away from rural Suffolk and its lack of basic amenities, where they still had to pump water in the back yard, but the east of England can still claim him as one of their own.

So too Martin Brundle, who was born in King’s Lynn, the closest large town to where Russell grew up, with a population of nearly 50,000 people. Brundle was raised surrounded by cars – his father John was a rally enthusiast and a vehicle trader – so he was no stranger to taking engines apart and putting them back together again. At just twelve years old, he built himself a Ford Anglia to race at Pott Row, where they held grass-track ‘banger’ races, a format that allows and encourages contact between cars and is always entertaining to watch. Once he was sixteen, he moved up to hot-rod racing, a more orthodox format that to this day holds its world championship in the Suffolk town of Ipswich. He moved onwards and upwards, first racing saloon cars under the name of his father’s dealership and then funded into single seaters by Carter Builder, a Lincolnshire-based construction firm, retaining his Fenland roots.

Having shown plenty of pace and completely falling in love with racing, Brundle wanted to move into bigger and faster vehicles but needed someone to take a chance on him. Still a teenager, he wrote to Tom Walkinshaw, asking directly for a drive. Walkinshaw had driven in Formula Two before launching his own eponymous racing team and took a punt on Brundle, putting him at the wheel in a BMW Championship race. He qualified on the front row and finished second. It earned him Walkinshaw’s lasting respect and set him on a path that eventually took him all the way to the podium in Formula One. It was not the orthodox way into top-tier racing – even with Walkinshaw, Brundle reputedly rarely had more than a handshake rather than a contract – but Brundle has often quoted the old saying, ‘People in Norfolk dew [sic] things different.’

It was particularly poignant, and maybe no coincidence, that Brundle’s big BMW result, the one that he describes as the most important of his fledgling career, came at Snetterton, the biggest racetrack in the east of England, hosting races in the British Touring Car Championship, British GT Championship and the British Superbike Championship, as well as Formula 4 rounds and some regional Formula 3 racing. The circuit is situated on an old air base, abandoned after the Second World War and easily converted into a racetrack. In fact, East Anglia is replete with such opportunities: there are a total of 53 former Royal Air Force stations in Norfolk alone, as well as another 32 in Suffolk, 26 in Essex and 22 in Cambridgeshire. It is perhaps surprising there are not more racetracks in this part of the country given these numbers.

Snetterton, though, has remained a hub for motor sport in the area. In years gone by, that was in no small part thanks to Jim Russell, Norfolk’s first real local racing celebrity. Russell was no relation to George, but did grow up in Downham Market, just fourteen miles away from Tydd St Giles. Born in 1920 above the fish and chip shop that his parents ran, he was one of six children and was christened Herbert James Russell. Having first worked selling ice cream from a bicycle, he joined the RAF and serviced aircraft in Africa and then Italy during the war, before returning to England and opening a car dealership.

Racing came later, and by chance. He went down to Snetterton in 1952 with a friend and decided, with typical post-war bravado, that he quite fancied a go at that. At 32, he ended up making his way into Formula 3 in a Cooper-JAP Mk VI, a small single-seater racer with a motorcycle engine in it. When he later replaced the JAP engine with a faster Manx Norton one, he started winning races, and in 1954 he beat Stirling Moss, arguably the greatest British racer of all time and the best in the world during the early post-war years, at Brands Hatch. He regularly raced and beat the likes of Moss, Jack Brabham and Bruce McLaren on his way up the ranks, before disaster struck at Le Mans in the famous 24-hour race when Russell crashed, sustaining third-degree burns, two broken wrists, broken ribs and a broken leg. His brother Peter managed to arrange a private plane to fly him back to England where he began his recovery. He did race again but never at the same level, and he retired soon afterwards.

Jim set up his racing school before he himself actually started racing. He sought to create a simple and inexpensive model for those who could not necessarily afford to race as privateers to train as racing drivers, paying just over a pound a week for one full day of lessons every month for a year. Drivers who passed the course could enter club-level events, and after six races, they could move up to compete internationally for a team that was sponsored by Russell’s driving school. It was a machine that seemed to feed and fund itself: Russell had created the world’s first driving academy.

‘He really established the template on which most other racing drivers’ schools came to be based,’ said commentator Ian Titchmarsh after Russell’s death. He was not far wrong. Russell was something of a visionary.

His greatest success story, apart from launching four more Jim Russell Racing Driver Schools, one at Silverstone and three more all over the world, was Emerson Fittipaldi. He came to learn under Russell in 1969, and within one season of his tutelage, the Brazilian was British F3 champion. In 1972 and 1974, he won the F1 world title. Other successful drivers followed in his footsteps, including Derek Bell and Jacques Villeneuve. When Russell died at the age of 98 in March 2019, the Jim Russell Trophy Meeting at Snetterton, featuring a series of classic revival races from the 1970s, was inaugurated.

In the 1990s, the driver school moved to Donington and is now a franchised brand, while the garage he ran in Downham Market has since been turned into housing. But the name Jim Russell still resonates in those parts as someone who gave thousands of drivers their first taste of racing – it also features as the name of the housing development where his dealership used to stand.

Long before George had got behind a steering wheel for the first time, the name Russell was already synonymous with motoring success in his Fenland hometown.

2

RUSSELL JR

The Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports is probably not high on the list of subscription titles for many motor-racing fans, so it’s entirely likely that not a single one will have read the article on ‘Sibling dynamics and sport expertise’, published in the February 2015 edition.

In it, sports scientists from Australia and Canada collaborated to analyse data across 33 different sports from over 300 athletes. They felt much of the previous research into the familial influence on sporting development was focused on the parents and instead wanted to learn more about the influence of siblings on an individual’s sporting success. They found that there was a significant trend towards younger siblings being more successful in sport.

‘Elite athletes were more likely to be later-born children, while pre-elite and non-elite athletes were more likely to be first-born,’ the study concluded.

‘Compared with siblings of non-elite athletes, siblings of elite athletes were more likely to have participated in regular physical activity and were more likely to have participated in sport at the pre-elite and elite levels. These results suggest siblings may play a key role in sport expertise development.’

What was particularly interesting about the findings was that previous studies into sibling performance found first-born children to be high achievers in academic and professional life, with some assumption that this would translate into sport. It had previously been noted, however, that in early motor-skills tests, later-born children would generally outperform first-born counterparts, suggesting that some of the advantages of having an older brother or sister start very early on in life.

To some families, this was not news. By 2015, tennis player Andy Murray had already won two grand slam titles and an Olympic gold medal and was some way towards becoming world number one. His mother Judy in the stands, raucously cheering and applauding her son’s every win, often drew the eye of TV cameras and, inevitably, the attention of the public. She was credited with having performed something of a miracle by raising a tennis player able to overcome the suffocating expectations of the British sporting collective and win Wimbledon, the first home player to triumph in the men’s singles for 77 years.

Judy herself had been a national-level player in Scotland and briefly played on the professional tour, but quickly swapped playing for coaching. Once her two sons Jamie and Andy were old enough, she took them to the local courts and started coaching them. Jamie, who was fifteen months older than Andy, was the most naturally gifted of the two.

‘I’m not sure if I took to it straight away,’ Andy says. ‘I can’t really remember, but my mum said I wasn’t very good.’

However, Andy was competitive, fiercely so. Swingball – where the ball is attached to a central pole and players bat it back and forth in a circle – was a family favourite, but it was never played purely for fun. There had to be points on offer to denote a winner and a loser. More often than not, Andy was the loser: fifteen months is not a big gap in age, but when you’re three or four, it represents an enormous chunk of physical development.

Some of that competitiveness came from the family environment, of course. As well as Judy’s own credentials, her father Roy had played professional football in the 1950s as well as high-level tennis, and the Murray boys spent plenty of time at their grandparents’ house growing up.

But the sibling dynamic also created an environment for Andy to excel physically. He was constantly held to a physical standard impossibly higher than his own, creating what sports coaches call a ‘stretch goal’. The concept behind stretch goals is that athletes who constantly achieve goals that are within their reach pull up, satisfied to have done what was asked of them. A stretch goal that is beyond their capabilities, and of which they often fall short, creates a drive forwards, an incentive for constant improvement, and it tends to cut off complacency at source.

In the early 1990s, they might not have had a name, but stretch goals certainly played a part in the Murray household. As well as tennis, Jamie and Andy were both keen footballers, albeit the latter more so. Jamie had already been identified as one of the top junior tennis players in the UK and had pretty much committed to the sport before he reached the age of ten. Andy struggled to keep up with him on the court and still held out hopes of pulling on the green-and-white shirt of Edinburgh side Hibernian, just as his grandpa Roy had done. Mentally, he was not as tunnel-visioned, but physically he was well beyond his age group.

Eventually, Andy did fully commit to tennis and with great success, the stretch factor of having to beat his brother (it remains a point of family contention exactly when he first achieved this) no doubt having played a part in his development, but the sibling rivalry remained. Both played a lot of golf growing up and still get out together when they can, arguing about who is better. Jamie got down to a handicap of three at one point, a claim to which Andy once responded in a joint interview: ‘I must be a two-handicap golfer because I always beat you.’ Clearly, those early Swingball clashes were just a sign of things to come.

The Murrays are among tennis’ most famous siblings, but probably cannot top Serena and Venus Williams. They do have plenty in common, though, having both won grand