‘he has leaped above us all’ says Wolff as Mercedes look to improve
29th August 2022Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team’s team principle, Toto Wolff, states Red Bull’s Max Verstappen has ‘leaped above us all’ after a dominating performance in Belgium.
Although Verstappen had an engine penalty which put him 14th on the grid, the defending world champion put in a dominating performance to secure another win – his ninth victory this season – at Belgium’s Spa-Francorchamps.
The new technical directive, which came into force at Spa, didn’t seem to hamper the Red Bull’s who looked to be untouchable all weekend. Verstappen even managed to secure the fastest lap with a single run in Q3, on Saturday afternoon.
In contrast to Red Bull, Mercedes had a dismal weekend after what seemed to be a promising summer break for the Brackley-based outfit.
Following a poor qualifying performance, Sir Lewis Hamilton’s first DNF of the season and George Russell’s P4 finish, Wolff believes the team can’t be satisfied with their weekend.
In a statement, Wolff said:
“I don’t think we [Mercedes] can be satisfied with this weekend – if you see Verstappen, he has leaped above us all.
“We really need to find out how we can improve our car because the gap is just too big. We’re giving the drivers a very difficult car to drive and it hasn’t got the pace on a single lap so we need to work ourselves out of this situation.
“Over the next four days, we’ll be putting our heads together, setting our sights on the next race and also next season.
“It’s important we stay level-headed, keep our spirits up and don’t flip too much between elation and depression – this weekend is a low but in Hungary three weeks ago, we were thinking we will absolutely win a race, so we’ll never give up.”
Prior to their arrival at Spa, the Mercedes team went into the summer break in good spirits as they looked capable of securing pole positions and – potentially – race wins.
However, the two drivers struggled to get the tyres up to their optimal temperature on a single lap. Throughout practice and qualifying, the duo would commit to very aggressive out lap – in a bid to get into the right temperature window, but even that didn’t work in their favour.
This issue, at the longest track on the calendar, gave the Silver Arrows their biggest deficit to pole position, as reported by F1, of 1.7%.
But lessons can be learnt as, Mercedes’ Technical Director, Andrew Shovlin said:
“The weekend overall has been tough. We’d hoped to move forward here with our updates and whilst it seems that Ferrari are closer to us on race pace, Red Bull are clearly not.
“We have struggled with the various compromises the car has here, much more so than the races leading into the summer break and that’s definitely made our lives more difficult.
“In many ways that has given some useful learning, the car isn’t yet performing well enough over a range of tracks so it’s clear we need to widen the working window.
“We were also poor on the single lap which is another area we have to focus on; with a bit more track temperature today, the warm-up was much better but it’s been a recurrent issue over a range of conditions and circuits, and something we have to improve.
“We’ve got a couple of days to regroup and plan for Zandvoort, it’s got some similar challenges with very fast corners so hopefully we can make a bit of progress having analysed the data from this weekend.”
That’s it for the article: ‘he has leaped above us all’ says Wolff as Mercedes try to improve! What do you think, is Verstappen in a league of his own? Let us know in the comments!
Read more Formula 1 here!
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- Belgian GP: Perez sets fastest time at end of FP3
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Hi, I’m Kamron. I created ApexMotorsports.co.uk in the dying embers of the 2021 Formula 1 world championship. It allowed me freedom to write whatever I wanted to write about which was all things motorsports, my passion.
I have put a lot of effort in over the years to keep this website in its best shape and I’ve loved seeing the brand grow consistently, month-on-month, year-on-year. My ambition is to keep watching this brand grow into a primary outlet of news for all things motorsports whilst fueling my desire to pursue a career in sports journalism, specialising in motorsports.
Kamron Kent
Hi, I'm Kamron. I created ApexMotorsports.co.uk in the dying embers of the 2021 Formula 1 world championship. It allowed me freedom to write whatever I wanted to write about which was all things motorsports, my passion. I have put a lot of effort in over the years to keep this website in its best shape and I've loved seeing the brand grow consistently, month-on-month, year-on-year. My ambition is to keep watching this brand grow into a primary outlet of news for all things motorsports whilst fueling my desire to pursue a career in sports journalism, specialising in motorsports.
