The plan was stopped by a health and safety officer in an ironic move.

George Russell and Lewis Hamilton were team-mates at Mercedes (Image: Getty)

George Russell has described the current generation of F1 cars as “brutal”, expressing his complaints about driver comfort behind the wheel. The Mercedes racer also lifted the lid on a failed plot to have a team designer sit inside the cockpit in the simulator to demonstrate the extent of the issues.

The ground-effect cars debuted in 2022, and immediately, drivers started to complain about porpoising issues. Caused by extreme bouncing on the straights, which was a byproduct of the low ride heights required to extract speed from the vehicles, F1 stars experienced several physical symptoms.

These have been somewhat alleviated over the years, but Russell, along with a number of his F1 rivals, is keen to see the back of the ground-effect machines. At the height of their discomfort, the Brit even hatched a clever plan with former team-mate Lewis Hamilton, but this was scuppered by health and safety protocols.

“Oh yeah, to be honest, they are brutal cars,” he declared at the Qatar Grand Prix. “We’ve got a rig that does simulated replays of a lap, replaying the suspension movements from the chassis side, and Lewis and I wanted to put one of our chief designers in this car to do a replay of Baku.

“[It was] to show how aggressive the porpoising was, and the health and safety officer said it was too dangerous, so that gives a bit of perspective. You’re driving around for an hour and a half, you’re shaking all over the place and your back, your body, your eyes.

“I remember the first year of Las Vegas, I couldn’t see the brake marker boards because the car was hitting the ground so aggressively, I was doing 240mph, and I just couldn’t see it. I spoke with a few drivers and half the grid was the same, so yeah, I am glad we’re moving away from this.”

Max Verstappen has also suffered physical symptoms (Image: Getty)

Russell’s complaints follow comments from four-time world champion Max Verstappen, who explained that the bumpy nature of the current cars has left him with lasting back and foot pain.

“It hasn’t been comfortable at all, all these years,” he told Dutch media at the Las Vegas Grand Prix last weekend. “My whole back is falling apart, and my feet always hurt. Physically, it hasn’t been the best.

“When you do scans, they don’t look good. On the other hand, if you look at motocross, we have nothing to complain about. But if you know what it was or what it could be, I’d rather go for what we had in 2015-2016.”