McLaren excel: Is Toto Wolff looking at McLaren with envy?

No jealousy of McLaren for Wolff

McLaren has made great progress this season, resulting in the first win for Lando Norris. The other UK-based team, Mercedes, is following this progress closely. "Why I love this sport is that the stopwatch never lies and they have done a good job and we have to have respect from how they’ve done things," says Toto Wolff, Mercedes team boss.

"So I’m not looking at that with some envy, on the contrary, I’m looking at that and saying, this is what we need to achieve because they have been able to do that," the German team boss said. Wolff says the two teams had a different approach to developing the car. "They changed the concept late in the winter, I believe, of their car and bit their time until they brought that upgrade," Wolff adds.

"Since then, they have been adding performance. And I think this is where we are trying to get to a stable platform where we say, okay, this is what we want from the car, and then the development machine just runs with it," Wolff says. " we have been zigzagging a little bit of what we thought we need to have the performance. But one thing in Formula One you can’t buy, and that is time. Once you got it wrong, you’re on the back foot and then you just. It’s very difficult to, you know, leapfrog."

This article was written in collaboration with Sophia Crothall.