“Frustrating when you’re not competing at the front,” Toto Wolff says lack of qualifying pace costing Mercedes every week
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Toto Wolff
For eight seasons from 2014 to 2021, Mercedes were THE team in Formula One. They won every single Constructor’s Championship and were not even particularly (consistently) challenged on any front except against Red Bull in 2021, which they eventually came out on top of anyways, despite Lewis Hamilton having to stomach defeat in the Drivers’ Championship.
That’s why it was such a surprise to see them squarely as only the third-best car on the grid. They were quite a way from both Red Bull and Ferrari in terms of performance on most weekends, but recently they have started to climb their way towards the front. However, for this year, the championship is probably too far.
What they can still do is get P2 in the WCC. They are only 30 points behind Ferrari, which is a credit to their consistency and pristine reliability as much as it is a result of Ferrari’s own missteps – from reliability, driver mistakes, and perhaps most notably – strategy and decision making.
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Toto Wolff: We hope to race for victories in the second part of the season
As reported by GPBlog, in his mid-season review on Mercedes’ YouTube channel, Toto Wolff was disappointed by not being able to compete for victories from the start of the season. In the earlier races, Mercedes were plagued by bouncing and porpoising. The porpoising mostly seem to go away in Spain, while the bouncing stayed till Azerbaijan, where the drivers had to endure a hellish ordeal.
Wolff said: “The start of the season wasn’t really any good. And there is no other way of describing it. Because if you win the championship in December and then four months on you’re not competing with the guys in the front that’s frustrating.“
From Canada onwards, their performance has been considerably better when compared to earlier, as they have got on top of these two chief issues. They’ve had a podium in every race (Hamilton has 5 in a row) – and they even finished second (twice) for the first time this season in France and Hungary with Lewis Hamilton, even though he was not really able to compete with Max Verstappen.
He added: “We’ve been on the podium almost every single race. We were strong on the Sundays but never quite there in qualifying and the gap was simply too large.“
Wolff said that Mercedes hope they can compete for victories in the second part of the season: “So now it’s about trying to understand what it is and in the second half of the season hopefully increase our qualifying pace and then be able to race for victories.”
Mercedes are still in search of their first victory of the season. It’s unlikely that they will mount a meaningful championship challenge, but P2 is possible, and they will certainly be hoping to compete for victories in the second part of the season.
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Aniket Tripathi
(1002 Articles Published)