George Russell received a vote of confidence from Thierry Boutsen after a turbulent start to the 2026 Formula 1 season. The former F1 driver believes the British driver will regain his form and overcome the rough patch he has endured this year.
Russell sits third in the drivers’ standings, with 160 points after 11 races, but is 59 points behind his teammate Kimi Antonelli. The gap has widened due to reliability issues, incidents, and difficulties in consistently extracting the car’s maximum from the W17.
The season started on a positive note for Russell, who clinched victory in the Australian Grand Prix, but his situation grew more complicated as the ensuing rounds progressed. A retirement while leading in Canada was a major blow, while a first-lap collision with Lewis Hamilton at Spa-Francorchamps and an anti-stall issue at the start of the Hungarian Grand Prix also dented his points tally.
Meanwhile, Antonelli won five of the first six races and already has six victories in 2026. The Italian adapted to the car’s behaviour more naturally, while Russell even admitted early in the season that he was ‘perplexed’ by his drop in performance.
Boutsen, who won three Grands Prix with Williams between 1989 and 1990, believes that Russell’s current moment is part of a common arc in a driver’s career: “It’s also normal to go through cycles like this in your career, when everything is going perfectly, and suddenly you lose a bit of confidence, the car has a problem, so you lose even more confidence and you slip into a cycle where everything goes wrong,” he told the official Formula 1 site.
However, the Belgian does not view the current phase as final: “George will return, for sure. Whenever he gets the chance, he will come back,” Boutsen added, who also cautioned that Antonelli could face similar difficulties down the road: “Drivers go through moments of doubt and psychological struggles, and Kimi will have that too. Maybe not this year, maybe next, perhaps in two years, we’ll see,” he concluded.
