Toto Wolff shares the brutal truth about a difficult Austrian GP for Mercedes
Wolff and company will look to put a difficult Austrian GP behind them as they head to their home race at Silverstone
Heading into the Austrian Grand Prix, Mercedes believed that Red Bull Ring might present an opportunity for the team to demonstrate even more advancements with their upgraded W14.
As they leave Austria behind, the team is instead looking for yet more answers.
Mercedes struggled all week, with Lewis Hamilton failing to advance to SQ2 in the Sprint Shootout Saturday, and the team managing just a single point as George Russell finished eighth. Then on Sunday when the race was over — and all the post-race penalties were settled — they came away with Russell in P7, and Hamilton in P8 at the end of a frustrating day.
“Today was a bruising day for the team. We’ve had a positive upward trajectory recently but clearly, we didn’t have the pace we needed here. It’s been a tough weekend overall and both drivers have struggled with the car since FP1,” noted Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff. “From Friday onwards, we have seen that we were lacking a couple of tenths and we couldn’t make the car quicker.”
Hamilton, who was one of the first drivers handed a penalty for exceeding track limits, was certainly frustrated both during the Grand Prix, and after it. At one point as Hamilton was lamenting the penalty situation during the race, Wolff advised him over the radio that “Lewis the car is bad we know. Please drive it.”
After the race, Hamilton explained the situation with his W14, and the difficulties keeping the car within limits.
“We knew we didn’t have a strong rear-end this weekend, so we took out a lot of front-wing to maintain the balance. I was really struggling into certain corners, particularly Turn 10, and sliding, which I couldn’t do anything about it,” said Hamilton in the team’s post-race media report. “That is why I was struggling with track limits. We added some front-wing at both stops and the car began to come back to us, but it was still a challenge.”
For Russell — who actually finished P8 behind Hamilton in P7, but saw the two flip places when Hamilton was one of the drivers hit with an additional post-race penalty — the feel just was not there this weekend. That included in the Sprint race when Russell did not advance to SQ3 due to a failure with his hydraulics, and needed a bold call regarding tyres to pull off his eighth-place finish.
“We have the same car that we had in Barcelona where we were flying so we need to understand what went wrong on our side,” said Russell after the Grand Prix. “The car certainly doesn’t feel how we want it to at the moment. It’s moving around a lot, and it felt a little bit worse this weekend than at other circuits; the pace was substantially worse though, so we need to get to the bottom of that.”
A possible silver lining? The team head home to Silverstone for this weekend’s British Grand Prix. Both the environment — and the track itself — should put Mercedes on much more solid footing.
“The swings are quite interesting from circuit to circuit where sometimes we are the closest challengers to Red Bull, and at others struggling,” said Wolff, looking ahead to next weekend. “We have a step of performance that we are bringing to Silverstone. Let’s see if that circuit suits the characteristics of the car a little more and we will analyze from there.”
“Our performance is clearly circuit dependent now. We were nowhere here but good in Montreal and Barcelona,” added Russell. “That bodes well for Silverstone as that is a circuit more similar to Barcelona than Austria, so we’re excited for next weekend’s British Grand Prix. We will be aiming to come back stronger.”