F1 News
Toto Wolff: "It was a colossal f*ck up"
Mercedes looked like they had the race under control until they had a major failure in the pit lane under the safety car. The pit crew mixed up the tyre allocation ruining both George Russell and Valtteri Bottas' races. Team boss Toto Wolff describes this as a "colossal f*ck up".
Disaster in the pits
Jack Aitken spun and left part of his front wing on the track. This resulted in a safety car and the Mercedes reacted with what usually is a clever double stack. But it didn't work out under the floodlights in Bahrain.
"First of all the podium It's great to see... it's a refreshing new podium with Esteban and happy for him to score. Checo has incredible pace. Today, it was a colossal fu*k up," Wolff told Sky Sports after the race. Simply one of the tyre crews didn't hear the call they must have had radio failure in the garage and when the car came in then they didn't know that we had to change the one tyres and that is why we ended up with the wrong sets of tyres."
Did Mercedes need to stop? "It was actually a safety stop. We were fine on the hard and we could have stayed out and we had to gap. You can question it but it's the right call."