Wolff admits Mercedes MISTAKE cost Russell in Hungarian Grand Prix qualifying

Toto Wolff has said that Mercedes ‘made a mistake’ with George Russell’s qualifying strategy for the Hungarian Grand Prix, after the driver failed to make it out of Q3.

Russell was frustrated when him heading out so late for a flying lap meant that he couldn’t make a time fast enough to go through to the second round of qualifying for the race, leaving him stuck in an unfortunate position on the grid.

Wolff has admitted that Russell’s disappointing session was down to a ‘mistake’ in team strategy.

After the race, he said: "We made a mistake with George. We should have put him in a much better position on track and we've apologised to him for that.

"There's a gentleman's agreement that you don't overtake one another as time is running out. He had a number of cars move ahead of him though and that obviously screwed up his last lap."

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For his part, Russell said that he was ‘really disappointed’ with the result.

He said after the session: "Really disappointed because we didn't need to take so many risks ... the car was more than quick enough to get through to Q2 or Q3.

"You've all got to think about yourself at one point. There's just so many cars on track. I understand why some cars did it.

"You had [Alfa Romeo's] Valtteri [Bottas] on a lap, got blocked by six cars. But we shouldn't have been there in the first place.

"If you don't do things right you'll get punished and we got punished for sure."

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