Toto Wolff, the principal of the Mercedes team, reacted angrily and dejectedly to Lewis Hamilton and George Russell’s disappointing Brazilian Grand Prix weekend.
Naomi Schiff believes Toto Wolff might have overreacted following his Mercedes team’s disastrous Interlagos race this past weekend.
With only 11 points to show for their efforts at the Brazilian Grand Prix, the Silver Arrows departed Sao Paulo. Despite having severely degraded tires, they managed to score seven points in the Sprint, but Lewis Hamilton only managed to add four more in the Sunday main event, and George Russell had to retire due to an oil temperature issue.
Wolff responded to what he had seen with emotion in his speech afterward. There are no words to describe that “inexcusable performance,” he said. Whatever we did to that car was awful because it finished second both the previous week and the week before.
“George and Lewis drove such a miserable thing that I can only feel bad for them. Lewis made it out there alive. Thus, it demonstrates how challenging the car is—it’sperilous. We need to improve it for next year because it is inconceivable that after seven days of podium finishes with a strong, fast car, you are nowhere.
“We’re clearly not world champions on Sprint race weekends. We did some good work here at the track to get it done, but it still doesn’t explain what went wrong. The car drove like it was on three wheels and not four.”
Wolff’s remarks paint a dire picture for Mercedes for the upcoming season as well as the final two races of 2023. However, Schiff, a pundit for Sky Sports F1, is not persuaded that the situation at the team is as dire as the Austrian claimed.
She said on the Sky F1 podcast, “Overall, of course, it was not a great weekend for them.” They lacked speed and, in contrast to most of the teams around them, were clearly wearing down their tires more quickly, which is highly unusual for their vehicle. As a result, they were unable to use the tires as intended and experienced problems with reliability.
“So there were a lot of things going wrong for them. But, if you look back just two races, they had two podiums in two races and that car was moving forward in a positive trajectory. So I think, although it was quite a dramatic result for them, it does just seem like it may be a one-off.
“Maybe they know more than we do – obviously, they do – but, at the end of the day, we’ve seen that car in the past be very, as Toto described it, on a knife’s edge so that working window for them is very narrow. I think that, given the fact it was a Sprint weekend, it’s possible that they led themselves in the wrong direction when it comes to setups. I’m pretty sure they’re having major debriefs right now.
However, I’m not sure if we should take Toto’s response too seriously. It was a pretty gloomy view, in my opinion, for a weekend that obviously didn’t turn out the way they had hoped. However, are they really in such a terrible situation at this point? I believe that they aren’t in such a dire situation as recent history indicates.”
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