George Russell starts P6 as Kimi Antonelli takes pole in Austin after Q3 “snowball” slide

By Vancouver Television Sports Desk

George Russell will start from sixth for the United States Grand Prix after concluding Austin qualifying with no better than P6, despite a title challenge context in which he was looking to keep pressure on teammate Kimi Antonelli. Russell said he believed “top three was definitely on the cards,” but he acknowledged that he “simply didn’t get a decent lap” in the final sequence of corners and that his overall Q3 pace dropped compared with Q2.

Speaking after the session, the Briton said he could not have expected to fight for pole, but noted that a key signal was how his lap slowed in Q3. “I went slower in Q3 than I did in Q2, so that says enough,” Russell said, pointing to two unsuccessful laps in Q3 as the straightforward reason he ended up well off the pace.

Russell also struggled to pinpoint exactly why he was so far away from the front, but he traced the damage to a specific moment on his lap. He said a single slide around Turn 12 quickly escalated: “Just one slide around Turn 12, and then it was just a snowball. Lost it all in Sector 3.” In his view, the loss of control and the resulting setback in the crucial final sector effectively removed any realistic chance of improving.

The conditions were a factor across the circuit, and Russell attributed part of the difficulty to the weather changes during the session at the Circuit of The Americas. He said the wind made it tricky for everyone and added that cloud cover appeared to have an impact on performance. “The cloud cover was having quite an impact as well,” Russell said, noting that the sun coming out did not help his first lap.

Russell further suggested that the track temperature swings from the shifting conditions influenced tyre performance, especially later in the lap. “Just for everyone, the track temperature raises by a couple of degrees, and when you get to Sector 3, that has a huge difference in the tyres and the window,” he explained, implying that drivers needed very precise timing as the session evolved.

Looking ahead to Sunday’s race, Russell said Ferrari’s apparent advantage throughout the weekend shapes the outlook for race pace. He commented that he did not expect Ferrari outside the top three, and added that it will now be “interesting for the race pace” to see how the earlier performance translates when the race strategy takes over. With Antonelli starting from pole and multiple teams positioned between them on the grid, Russell’s focus turns to overcoming a gap after qualifying volatility rather than matching pole-speed directly at the front.

Russell ended up 0.441 seconds behind Antonelli, with both Red Bulls and both Ferraris splitting them on the grid for the United States Grand Prix—an arrangement that underlines how qualifying conditions and small errors significantly reshaped the starting positions. Whether Russell can recover from P6 will depend on how the opening stint settles after the mid-session swings he described.