Toto Wolff: Sometimes there is a sense of annoyance

Toto Wolff acknowledged that Lewis Hamilton and George Russell had problems building Mercedes cars again in Baku – this unpleasant phenomenon returned, although a few stages ago in Barcelona the team seemed to have found a way to deal with it.

During practice on the Azerbaijani track, both Mercedes cars were subject to a pretty strong build-up, with Russell finishing the first day of the weekend on the 7th line of protocol, and Hamilton – overall on 12th.

“We have experienced the same problems where the car does not have enough speed precisely because it is prone to build-up,” the Mercedes head of the team admitted. – But it is also observed in others, for example at Ferrari. On this track everything looks a bit worse, and in some of its sections our cars hit the bottom of the track, and this negatively affects the aerodynamics and has a big impact on the speed on the straights.

We see that some machines don’t have this problem, while others have it more pronounced. Obviously I’m also talking about our racers and sometimes it gets to the point where even doctors can’t take away the consequences of this. We have to follow the development of the situation, we have to understand why destabilization affects some machines more than others.

We lose a few tenths due to sub-optimal ground clearance and yesterday we lost a full second to Ferrari and Red Bull on all straights. All this is, of course, frustrating. After all, the team has been successful for years and suddenly you suddenly fall so deep, even if you just keep working.

But if before such work brought success, now it does not give the desired results – it is not surprising that sometimes a feeling of disappointment arises, but we are willing to admit it frankly. There is still a lot to do, but expectations are high, because we know the car has a lot of potential, but so far we have not been able to fully develop it.”