"I just wanted to get out of there," admits George Russell when asked why he opted to give his teammate's title celebrations a miss.

The cost of excusing the Briton from media duties and allowing him to leave the track early was €5,000 to Mercedes, but the cost of 'losing' the title was clearly much, much more to Russell.

Toto Wolff had admitted to Russell being "distraught" and suffering a "catastrophic moment", and on Thursday, in Brazil, it was time face the media and explain it.

"In racing you always pick yourself back up and for me the best way to pick myself back up was getting out of there," explained Russell. "It was as simple as that really.

"I was just very upset with missing out on the chance of a good result because the championship for me was already over," he admitted, of a race in which many ways summed up his season, "but it was just... I just couldn't believe how things had panned out again.

"In that moment I just wanted to get out of there," he added. "I think 99% of the time a true professional and I try not to spit my dummy out, but sometimes missing out on doing the press... OK, it's not ideal but not the end of the world. Moments like that you don't really want to deal with it."

Reflecting on a season in which his teammate has scored 130 more points, 6 more wins and 10 more podiums, and not suffered a single DNF, he said: "These issues constantly keep popping up but unfortunately this always seems like it's on my side of the garage.

"We concluded we've only had six races from the 20 where we've had a clean weekend," he continued. "So to think 14 of those weekends have had issues is unbelievable.

"We need to look to understand why that is, if there's something we are overlooking or if it's just pure misfortune.

"At the moment it does seem like it's more misfortune than anything. In a normal season you might have two weekends or three weekends where there are issues, we've had three quarters of this season and that has been incredibly unfortunate.

"It wasn't meant to be this season," he said, "but you also need to look at yourself in the mirror and think, 'what could I have done better?' Is all of the misfortune truly misfortune? Or is it actually things in our control that could have been better?

"So you need to just have a deep, deep look in the mirror and pick yourself up again and go from there."