Toto Wolff: In Las Vegas we crushed everyone

Toto Wolff, the head of the Mercedes team, is very happy with the victory double achieved by George Russell and Lewis Hamilton in Las Vegas.

By the way, this is the 60th achievement in the history of the factory team of the Stuttgart concern, and for the first time the drivers took the first two places in the Grand Prix more than 70 years ago. This happened in France in July 1954, at the Reims circuit, after which Juan Manuel Fangio and Karl Kling opened the scoring for Mercedes’ victorious doubles match.

Toto Wolff: “If someone could understand these machines, that would be absolutely great. Because we simply crushed all our competitors today, we dominated and could easily have gone even faster. But at times we were doing the laps almost a few seconds faster than the others.

I was very happy with the result, the team fully deserved it, because to achieve this we worked with great effort at our bases in Brackley and Brixworth, and the racing crew carried out their duties on the circuits.

When you develop a car, when you’re going to race it, you want it to perform equally well on every track. But for us everything is fine when there are high speeds, cool weather conditions and at the same time not very much grip.

Of course we have something to be proud of in this regard. But once temperatures rise, we don’t perform nearly as well. But we certainly liked the conditions in which the Las Vegas Grand Prix took place.

George Russell just rode fantastic today, he seemed to come from another planet and was always, at every moment of the race, in control of its progress. One of the highlights, in my opinion, was the way he fended off Charles Leclerc’s attacks. And Lewis Hamilton fought back, starting from 10th position, and thanks to a very fast car he finished just five seconds behind his teammate. Our racers are great, hats off to them!

It’s been a long time since our previous winning double, and this is a great result for the whole team. Everyone did a great job this weekend, we were fast from the first practice and confirmed our speed on Friday and Saturday. I am also happy that we have set up the cars very well.

Max Verstappen became world champion for the fourth time today and this is a well-deserved success that he achieved thanks to the fact that he had an excellent first half of the season. But we hope we can compete with him next year.”