As this August break approached, there was a growing feeling in the paddock that Russell will be the man alongside Hamilton next year.
There’s been some squandered opportunities, notably in Imola last season and again this year, but those are the kind of mistakes you want a young driver to make while he’s at a backmarker team.
Bottas hardly made a compelling case for Mercedes to keep him and he goes into the summer break after causing a multi-car pile-up at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
His audition as Hamilton’s stand-in at the Sakhir Grand Prix last year suggested he won’t be daunted by the opportunity when he gets it.
When he lost his Racing Point drive at the end of 2018 Mercedes was unable to offer him a seat at the main team, but has effectively kept him on a long piece of string at a rival outfit – Ocon is still managed by Mercedes driver programme advisor Gwen Lagrue.
Russell’s body language leading into the summer break suggested he knows there’s something very good on the horizon for him.
A recent Autosport report suggested Alfa Romeo has made him their top candidate for 2022, while swapping places with Russell remains a possibility.
If Russell gets the Mercedes seat, Bottas would be an obvious candidate as his replacement at Williams. He would bring race-winning pedigree to the team, one which would hope to move up the competitive order under the revamped aero rules.
Williams is a Mercedes partner and boss Toto Wolff has floated the idea of one of the company’s Formula E drivers, Stoffel Vandoorne or Nyck de Vries, joining the team next season.
Former Red Bull and Toro Rosso driver Daniil Kvyat would also be a quick and experienced option who might relish a second chance in F1 away from the pressure of the Red Bull programme.
Russell’s heroics often make it easy to overlook Latifi, but he had been narrowing the gap in qualifying in the races leading up to Budapest.
Part of that is a great driver driving in an uncompetitive car, but another has been that Antonio Giovinazzi has been out-performing the Finn recently.
However, Ferrari is still reluctant to rush Schumacher through the ranks and this might keep him at Haas for another season at least.
Sergio Perez’s form alongside Max Verstappen has been erratic but good enough to warrant a second season at Red Bull.
Gasly feels confident he would succeed where he failed last time round, but admitted to ESPN in a recent interview that he feels Red Bull wants an experienced driver to lead AlphaTauri into next year’s rule change.
With so few of the current drivers heading for the exit at the end of 2021, it’s hard to find a space for rookies to join the grid next year.
Australian Oscar Piastri currently leads the Formula 2 championship after winning Formula 3 last year, and regularly displays the kind of talent that is hard to ignore.
Perfect F1 material then? The only problem — for want of a better word — is that he is part of the Alpine driver academy and the Alpine F1 team already has two drivers signed up for 2022 in recent race winner Ocon and two-time world champion Alonso.
However, talent is not always a guarantee of a place on the F1 grid, especially among teams with modest budgets.
With that, a team might also benefit from sponsorship deals and Chinese investment, although the sponsors Zhou currently has are not going to compete with the kind of backing Latifi and Mazepin have.
Shwartzman is currently third in the F2 championship in his second year in the series, but already has tough competition from within Ferrari’s Academy with the Italian team partly paying Schumacher’s way in F1 while still having last year’s F2 runner-up Callum Ilott on its books.