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Wolff: "The most painful day in my years at Mercedes"

08:58, 02 Jul 2018

byJake Williams-Smith

Toto Wolff says that the double retirement for Mercedes at the Austrian Grand Prix serves as a huge wake-up call to the team in their championship battle with Ferrari. Both Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas suffered reliability issues forcing them both to retire.

Having been comfortably the fastest in qualifying, Mercedes were expected to make a comfortable getaway and race between each other for the race victory, however as fate would have it, they would be packing up early rather than spraying champagne.

"I guess that was a major wake-up call," said Wolff.

"For me, the most painful day in my years at Mercedes, worse than Barcelona.

"I had plenty of people coming to see me before the start and saying, ‘This was going to be a walk in the park, 1-2, you have the quickest car.’

"This is exactly how motor racing can go. It can be very, very cruel and I think we had all the cruelty go against us today."

Wolff also noted that it wasn't just the double retirement that had the Mercedes team searching for answers after the race.

"What I think happened was we were running one and two and controlling the race, and suddenly you see your second car stopping.

"The VSC came out, we had half a lap to react, and we didn't. Fact. This is where we lost the race.

"At that stage of the race with the VSC, pitting is probably 80% the thing you need to do. With one car out there against two others, the thinking process that happened was, ‘What would happen if the others pitted (only) a car?’.

"We would come out behind Kimi, because they would leave Kimi out, and behind Max. What would that mean for the race?

"That whole thinking loop, I wouldn’t say distracted us, but we spent too much time on that."

Ironically enough, it was a Mercedes reliability fault that then triggered their rivals to pit and Mercedes to leave Hamilton out, effectively costing him a shot at the race victory.

The people at Brackley and Brixworth will have a lot to think about in the days between Spielberg and Silverstone.