Too slow and shaken up
Mercedes boss feels sorry for his drivers
4/24/2022 12:06 p.m
At Mercedes, you have doubts about your own car, it even causes pain. The team, spoiled by success, is not really competitive at the moment. The sound gets rougher because it’s not progressing properly. Team boss Toto Wolff is expecting the “coach question” soon.
Things are just not going well at Mercedes in the still young Formula 1 season: the team, used to success, is also struggling with itself and its new car at the race weekend in Emilia Romagna. The last time they won the constructors’ championship eight times in a row, after three races the impression is getting stronger that the W13 didn’t make a big splash this time. On the contrary. Mercedes also has a big problem with the so-called bouncing at Ferrari’s home game in Imola – at top speed on the straights, the silver arrow starts bouncing wildly. “You only get a headache when you’re watching,” commented ex-Mercedes driver Nico Rosberg on the pictures from qualifying on Sky.
The reason for the bouncing is the tearing off of the air flow under the car, which is actually supposed to generate downforce in the new ground-effect cars. The problem is well known, it is also too obvious. There is no solution yet. “It’s never so black and white that you say it’s clearly a bad design or a throw,” says team boss Toto Wolff in an exclusive interview with RTL / ntv. “But the fact is that our car has a lot of downforce on paper, but we don’t bring it to the track. That’s why you have to understand more and more about the next races: Which development direction do we want to take?”
“Will solve the problem, but…”
Before the race (from 2 p.m. live on RTL), the Austrian already feels sorry for his powerfully shaken drivers. “Sometimes the drivers need an osteopath to get everything back in order.” Wolff thinks his team is on the right track, even if Imola’s results so far don’t show it. “We believe that we are getting closer to the solution aerodynamically,” said Wolff RTL / ntv. “But you can’t replicate this bouncing in the wind tunnel.” In the sprint race on Saturday, both Mercedes drivers clearly missed out on the points: Russell defended his 11th place in qualifying, record world champion Lewis Hamilton even lost a place. “We will definitely solve the problem, but it just can’t be done overnight.”
Hamilton, who is currently 50 points behind the leader Charles Leclerc in the drivers’ standings and is even behind his new teammate George Russell, is developing too slowly: “We came here optimistically – and then not everything comes together. We have a total of We didn’t perform well enough as a team,” said Hamilton after qualifying on Friday, which was disastrous for him and Russell in 11th and 13th place, adding: “There are things we should have done but didn’t do.” Rosberg believes that his ex-team, which he left after winning the 2016 World Cup, “expected a lot more this weekend”.
The tone is getting rougher, also between Wolff and his top driver, who collected title after title during the long time together at Mercedes. But there is no internal blame, says Wolff. “Not at all. That has never existed in our team. What is there is ‘Tough Love’, we massively put our fingers in where it hurts. We also analyze mercilessly when we have done something wrong. But we are all in the same situation: the chassis people, the engine people, the drivers, also marketing and communication are all part of it. Only if we all do a really good job will the end result be good and that’s what it’s all about and that’s why we pull all on the same page.”
“shoulders are wide enough”
Until things are up and running again, Wolff will be the center of attention as Head of Mercedes Motorsport and the face of the team. The fact that there is criticism from many directions these days after rushing years that only ended with Lewis Hamilton missing the eighth world title in 2021 by a few meters, “doesn’t bother me at all, it was to be expected. It was to be expected that after so many years there will come a day when these questions will arise. You get written up, you get written down. The ‘coach question’ won’t be long in coming. But no problem at all, I’ve got enough shoulders for that. I’m a co-owner of this team, so don’t go anywhere. You also have to take the criticism.”
In any case, the motivation to shape the sporting present and future of the team is still high, says the success manager. “What we discussed earlier: motivation, energy level, is it still fun, I answered everything positively. If one day it weren’t the case, I would be the first to admit it and hand the stick to someone who runs faster . I’m enjoying it, I’m enjoying the turnaround, now let’s see if we can do it.”
Lewis Hamilton hasn’t given up hope either, even though he’s still a stranger to the W13. “There are people who look and say that I’ve never had such a bad car,” he said after his 14th place in the sprint race. “But I can assure you I did have that very well. The 2009 car was very, very far off and was the worst car I have ever had.” The W13 is “not far from that experience at the moment, but I think the car has a lot of potential. We finally got the car repaired back then and came back into the game. And I have the utmost confidence that my team can do the same here can.”
The last Mercedes world champion whose name was not Lewis Hamilton is skeptical about the quick turnaround at his ex-team. “They were two seconds slower per lap, that’s unbelievable, nothing goes straight,” said Nico Rosberg after the bad qualifying, in which both Silver Arrows had missed the top 10 for the first time in ten years.