Wolff: "Honda and Renault are on the same level as Mercedes"

Every year Mercedes seems to want to put the role of favourites in the shoes of another team, as they have been doing for several years towards Ferrari. Also this year it seems that Wolff judges the chances of other teams high. "Last year Ferrari had a better engine than we had. Who knows this year again, but we haven't seen that yet. In qualifying and the race we are really going to see how good everyone is", says Wolff to Motorsport.com.

Honda and Renault equal to Mercedes

Because of the long stop that F1 has, it is important to stay sharp. "The new calendar and the corona crisis bring many new challenges for all of us. Reliability is going to play a very important role in those first races". Because of the long stop, hardly any work has been done on the cars, so no work has been done on reliability.

"The cars are basically coming straight out of the containers of Australia and we don't have much time to test things on the test benches. So we will have to make optimal use of each session". Wolff expects that there will be strong competition on the motor front. "In the end we have to come up with a reliable and strong engine and then hope that's enough. Apart from Ferrari I wouldn't flatten out Honda and Renault. I think all engine suppliers are now at about the same level".