Toto Wolff: The distribution of the results remains a mystery

Toto Wolff, the head of the Mercedes team, commented on the results of his drivers during qualifying in Las Vegas, and they are thought-provoking, as George Russell climbed to fourth position, while Lewis Hamilton failed to qualify for the finale. showed only 12th time.

Toto Wolff: “Such a spread of results remains a mystery to us. When you manage to warm the tires to the required operating temperatures, you will immediately see the difference. We saw this during the third workout, but it’s hard to figure it out.

Lewis couldn’t reach a faster pace because he had no grip. In this case we are talking about a difference in rubber temperature of only 4-5 degrees – in one case the tires hold the track normally, in the second they do not.

But look at some other teams, for example McLaren: they are usually ahead, but today their drivers couldn’t even qualify for the second part of qualifying. On the other hand, the Ferrari cars were capable of astonishing speed in the final qualifying round. Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz are almost half a second faster than everyone else.

At the same time, we were pleased with Williams’ results, but we know they are excellent at warming up the tyres, which especially helps in cool weather conditions on fast circuits, and today this was confirmed again.

Returning to our car we have to admit that we are having problems due to the granulation of the rubber, but today’s practice did not take place at the same time as tomorrow’s race, but earlier, when it was still very slippery.

I think Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc, who will start before George, will go very fast, so we will have to be patient, try to find the best approach to the tires and wait until the granulation phase is over.

This will be extremely important, because during training we saw that the problem of granularity affected different teams in different ways. Overall, let’s see what we can achieve.”