F1 News
Wolff: "It's not just the incident at the end that is frustrating"
- GPblog.com
Toto Wolff could not hide his disappointment after the Azerbaijan Grand Prix when Lewis Hamilton threw away his chances of overtaking Max Verstappen after his retirement. He called Mercedes' performance 'unacceptable' if they are to compete with Red Bull Racing for the world title.
Wolff frustrated with Mercedes overall
He makes no bones about his opinion of his own team. "It's not just the incident at the end that's frustrating. It's that we're not living up to our own expectations. That goes for all of us: Lewis, the engineers, myself, everyone in the team", he says in conversation with Motorsport.com.
"It's just painful," Wolff continued. "You could see that we had the victory in our hands, we had one hand on the trophy because Max didn't score. It's just frustrating, and at the time so overwhelming. Operationally we just need to perform flawlessly, and we haven't done all of that in the last two weekends."
With second place, Hamilton could have run significantly ahead of Verstappen, while the latter was just on his way to running ahead of Hamilton until his race ended early. But Mercedes still wanted a shot at victory in Baku, and it seemed to work out when Hamilton got away better than Sergio Perez on the restart. He made a costly mistake, however, finishing outside the top ten.