Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said he and Lewis Hamilton are « destroyed » by the way their Azerbaijan Grand Prix unravelled on Sunday.
In a remarkable climax, Hamilton squandered a golden opportunity to reclaim the lead of the championship by driving straight on at the restart. The race had been stopped when Hamilton’s title rival, Max Verstappen, had crashed out of the lead four laps from the end with a tyre failure.
Hamilton’s mistake was linked to inadvertently touching the incorrect button on his steering wheel related to his brakes. Hamilton finished 16th.
With Valtteri Bottas finishing 12th and Red Bull’s Sergio Perez winning the race, it meant Red Bull gained a full 25 points on Mercedes in the constructors’ championship. Wolff said the result was hard to take.
« Both of us are destroyed, to be honest, » Wolff said. « For him obviously, as a driver, you have it, it’s so close, and then it’s all gone.
« We just need to be the best, the best of us, and the best that we have. And we haven’t given the drivers a competitive package this weekend. It’s been far from a competitive package.
« That is the frustration. It is not only the incident at the end, that frustrates. It’s overall not meeting our own expectations. All of us together: Lewis, the engineers, myself, everybody in the team. »
Baku was the second race in a row Mercedes did not send a driver to the podium, something unprecedented in this V6 turbo era.
At the Monaco Grand Prix, a pit-stop error forced Valtteri Bottas to retire while running in second position.
When asked if these were the hardest weeks of F1 he could remember, Wolff said: « Yeah, they are the toughest. Because not having performance in Monaco, and Valtteri, who would have made it solid on the podium, needing a pitstop of 36 hours, is not really a great achievement, based on the standards that we’re setting ourselves.
« Then the car that was almost all [practice] sessions nowhere. Then, to be honest, cruising in third and even trying to make it was okay.
« But it’s just not acceptable that we are not getting the car into a performant position after the start, or out of the pitstops. It’s just we’re losing seconds over seconds. »
https://www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/31582660/hamilton-wolff-destroyed-azerbaijan-gp-drama
