Mercedes reacted amusingly to the news that Valtteri Bottas and George Russell had removed their Formula 1 teams from their respective Instagram profiles.
The Express had reported that “last month Bottas ‘Instagram biography had a tag on Mercedes’ F1 account – but this has since been deleted.
“In the meantime Russell has also removed all mentions of Williams from his biography, which now only says” Formula 1 driver “.”
The hint of the story was that Russell might be ready to replace Bottas on the Mercedes team for 2021, even though the Finn already has a contract.
And the timing right after the Sakhir Grand Prix was related to Russell’s impressive competitive debut for Mercedes.
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The 22-year-old, who stood for Lewis Hamilton while the seven-time world champion had to skip the race with COVID-19, narrowly missed Bottas for pole position but knocked him off the starting line to take one of the lead he held until a failed double-stack pit stop under the safety car pulled the duo out of the top three.
Even then, Russell overtook Bottas – admittedly with the Finn on the same set of old hard tires as before his failed pit stop – and still had a chance to catch Sergio Perez for the race win until he suffered a puncture.
But in response to the edited Instagram profiles, Mercedes has asked F1 fans not to read anything … although it’s nice to know they know what the rumor mill is producing!
“It’s just an Instagram bio. Don’t overthink it “With an appropriate emoji, the world champions of design engineers have tried to downplay the situation and in fact there can’t be more than that.
Only time can tell.
For Bottas in particular, eighth place at the Sakhir Grand Prix was not the end of a weekend when he had the ideal opportunity to shape his authority and show that Mercedes had made the right decision to maintain their services for 2021.
Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff admitted that Bottas “didn’t shine” in the second of the two races in Bahrain, and the 31-year-old driver has not finished eighth in any of the last three Grand Prix.
Wolff also said about a possible all-British line-up of Lewis Hamilton and Russell: “George is a Williams driver, he’s under contract with Williams and our driver line-up is Valtteri and Lewis, so I don’t see this as a realistic situation this moment [2021].
“But I can understand that it would be an interesting situation, both in the team and maybe a wild ride for all of us. Maybe we will in the future. “
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