Toto Wolff on Mercedes’ problems at Zandvoort

The Mercedes team won the race at Spa with confidence, but in the first stage after the summer break at Zandvoort, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell not only claimed victory, but also finished in the top three. After the finish, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff wondered if the lack of speed could be due to the new underbody of the car, which was not working properly.

Toto Wolff: “Modern cars sometimes bring surprises. We had been on the podium six times in a row, but at Zandvoort our car looked nothing like the car that had finished first and second three weeks earlier. This is simply impossible without the influence of a major factor. We have to analyse everything a few days before Monza to identify this factor.

Is this because we installed a part on the car? Did we design something that doesn’t fit the car?

I think we can talk about two factors. On Friday we installed the update package on the car, but we couldn’t get enough data about its effectiveness because we couldn’t work well on the track. But the rest couldn’t cover enough distance on Friday. Maybe we made the wrong decisions, which affected the speed of the car.

I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but in the next few days we will study the telemetry and try to find an answer. Maybe it’s a question of settings, maybe it’s a question of the track. Maybe it’s the new surface? Or a combination of all these factors? Hopefully we can solve this before Monza and be competitive again.

But the drop in results from first and second place to seventh and eighth… There must be a serious reason for this. This cannot be due solely to a wrong choice of institutions.”