Jacques Villeneuve has ripped into George Russell’s performance at the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, branding it “very disappointing”.

F1 championship hopeful Russell, who entered 2026 as the bookies pre-season favourite for the title, finished a distant second behind Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari in Sunday’s race at Barcelona.

While Russell was able to reduce his deficit to Andrea Kimi Antonelli in the standings thanks to his Mercedes team-mate’s late retirement, Villeneuve branded the Briton as not looking “like a driver going for the championship”.

Russell struggled for pace in key moments of the race and was passed by Antonelli prior to the Italian’s W17 conking out with only a few laps to go.

“Russell wasn’t very good at defending was he? He left it too late, left the door open,” 1997 world champion Villeneuve told Sky Sports F1.

“He didn’t look like a driver going for the championship. He looked like he had already lost the battle to his team-mate.

“It was actually a disappointing drive from Russell today. He had no pace. Look at the qualifying he had, he had his team-mate covered.

“But he had no pace, he was going backwards, feeling the pressure, very disappointing.”

Nico Rosberg agreed with his fellow F1 world champion’s scathing verdict, insisting Russell still needs to improve on race day.

“It’s exactly what I said before the race, Russell is 10/10 in qualifying and I still have a little bit of doubts on his race pace,” Rosberg said.

“I haven’t seen the 10/10 in racing and that’s again what we saw today. Just a little bit missing there. Lewis was quick, Kimi was a little bit quicker it seemed. And Norris was very quick.

“George made a step forward this weekend, but he still needs to find a little bit more I think.”

Russell conceded he lacked the pace to challenge for victory. 

"18 more points than I’ve achieved in the last two races. I would take the positives from that and I would take the positives from the weekend as a whole," Russell said. 

"The race was feeling good, to be honest. I felt solid at the start and just slowly eking out the gap to Lewis, and he obviously committed quite early to the three-stop and then we covered, but stuck on the two-stop.

"From that point onwards it was quite challenging and just didn’t have the pace and wasn’t feeling too happy with the hard tyre."