Toto Wolff on an ‘up and down’ season for Mercedes: “You oscillate from depression to exuberance”
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Toto Wolff
After dominating Formula 1 for 8 years in a row – where they won every single constructor’s championship possible, people were understandably rather surprised that Mercedes were nowhere near the pace that Red Bull and Ferrari showed. Some thought that they were ‘sandbagging’ but they were not. They were nowhere near the top, stuck squarely in third place.
Fast forward to season break, and their season has certainly been up and down. On the one hand, they are comfortably in third place and have only a small gap to Ferrari on 2nd, some 30 points, which they will hope they can cut down in the races after the summer break, but the gap is much, much bigger if the pace was the only criteria.
Fortunately, it is not. As such, Mercedes, who are a tightly-run operation, have taken full advantage whenever Ferrari or Red Bull faltered. Their pristine reliability and the consistency of the drivers meant that they had more often than not been in a position to take advantage of missteps from the frontrunners, and they have done so on many, many occasions this season. Understandably, this is a rather odd situation, and Toto Wolff concedes that Mercedes have had ‘big swings’ in emotions at times.
Toto Wolff: It is a bit of ‘Groundhog Day’
Azerbaijan rather exemplifies Mercedes’ season – they were not anywhere near the pace of the frontrunners, the drivers struggled with a lot of porpoising, but then both Ferraris failed, and Mercedes finished 3 and 4. After Azerbaijan, their season picked up much better, and since Canada, Lewis Hamilton has finished on the podium every race.
In some races, Mercedes have really not been there, some weekends have turned around dramatically in moments, while in some they really have been competitive. It’s always a bit of a lottery of what Mercedes will turn up in the next race weekend, and Toto Wolf, talking to Motorsport, says that it has been rather difficult to manage.
“The truth is, it’s just so painful and it’s so difficult to live by your values and your doubt. You oscillate from depression to exuberance, and then the next day the other way around. And in a way that when you kind of think nothing that you do works, [it is] a bit of Groundhog Day.” Groundhog Day is a movie starring Bill Murray where the protagonist lives the same day over and over.
He further elaborated: “Then you make steps forward by looking at things and finding out they don’t function at all, and then you know what doesn’t go, and you go the other way and it functions. All the things I’ve preached, all the things that you read in books that it’s so hard, that it is so important to lose in order to thrive. It’s just lived in real life so far.”
It will be interesting to see where Mercedes season goes after the season break. The technical directives should help him, and they are certainly on Ferrari’s tail, and it is very feasible that they can catch them (obviously depending on performance), and a fight for P2 in the championship may be on the cards.
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Aniket Tripathi
(1002 Articles Published)