Kimi Antonelli qualified fourth for the Singapore Grand Prix on October 10, 0.189 seconds off pole, while George Russell was sixth. Running two different specifications, Mercedes gathered fresh feedback on Saturday: Antonelli felt the upgrade was beginning to show potential, but Russell found the car’s balance worse than on Friday after it was rebuilt following his Sprint crash.
Setup changes help, but Antonelli is still adapting to a narrow ideal window
Mercedes kept Antonelli on the upgraded package this weekend and Russell on the previous specification to allow a comparison. Russell was second and Antonelli seventh in Friday’s Sprint Qualifying; their order within the team reversed in Saturday’s Grand Prix qualifying.
In the team report, Antonelli said the team studied Friday’s data and tried changes in the Sprint, establishing a direction for further improvement in qualifying. He felt its understanding of the upgrade had grown, but the new package still had a narrower window for ideal performance than the old one.
He explained further to F1’s website that the car reacted differently depending on his driving approach. Finding the right balance remained difficult when trying to push faster on subsequent tyre runs.
Russell has the same setup, but a different feeling after the rebuild
While leading on the opening Sprint lap, Russell ran off the normal line at the final corner, ran onto the white line, lost grip and hit the wall. In the team report, he admitted pushing too hard too soon and making an error of judgment. The mechanics completed the rebuild before qualifying, allowing him to continue contributing to the comparison.
Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin explained that Russell’s setup had not changed, but many parts of the car had been rebuilt and the driver was less satisfied with the balance than on Friday. The team still needed to understand why. Russell’s back-of-grid race penalty for exceeding his power-unit component allocation was separate from his sixth-place qualifying result.
INKA SPORTS analysis: a reversal within the team does not settle the specification comparison
Two mutually supportive pieces of evidence point to Antonelli’s progress: he felt setup work improved the car, and he qualified closer to the front. That supports Mercedes having found avenues worth pursuing. The other car in the comparison, however, had just been crashed and rebuilt, and Russell explicitly reported a balance change. The conditions were not entirely stable.
Fourth ahead of sixth therefore cannot alone prove the upgrade is comprehensively better than the previous specification. More useful tests are whether Antonelli can consistently exploit that potential in the race and whether Russell’s unusual feeling can be explained. The team needs both to make the new package easier to drive and to ensure the other car provides a reliable basis for comparison.
Conclusion
Saturday brought Mercedes positive progress but also limits to the comparison. Antonelli found a better direction for using the package, while Russell needed an explanation for his changed feeling after the rebuild. With different starting positions for the Grand Prix, assessing the upgrade still requires considering their respective running conditions, rather than only their finishing positions.
