© Paul Ripke for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Toto Wolff is very pleased with Mercedes’ dominant 1-2 at the Styrian Grand Prix, but says team briefings after winning a race look like they actually “lost out badly”.
“I think we can be very satisfied with this weekend, with a great drive to victory for Lewis and Valtteri coming home to secure a 1-2 finish for the team,” said Wolff.
“It’s been a tremendous job from everybody to get our worries from last weekend under control and deliver this level of performance.
“The gearbox issue was fixed, and the suspension concerns were still not 100% comfortable, but in the end, it was all good.
“This track hasn’t been too kind to us in recent years, but we were never really troubled here and bringing the two cars home like this is a nice result.
“Now we look ahead to Budapest and the final round of this triple-header. We have been starved of motor racing for so long, so we can’t wait to be back out on track again in just a couple of days.
“We just love the stopwatch, the brutal honesty of it and the Hungaroring is a great track and a very different challenge to Spielberg, so it will be interesting to benchmark ourselves there.”
Despite tremendous success, Wolff says Mercedes always keeps a level head.
“We’re always sceptical about our own performance, we just always think it’s not good enough,” explains the Austrian.
“We’re almost like hunting ourselves down and that is the mindset of this team, never to be satisfied with a result.
“When you are listening in the debrief on Monday morning after winning a race, you would think this is a team that has lost out badly.
“It’s just a culture we have developed over the last years that we never blame a person, we always blame the problem.
“Last weekend was another proof. We won the race with Valtteri, we didn’t finish in a satisfactory position with Lewis, we were worried to DNF with both cars and then the next weekend we came back very strong, reliability woes solved and a very competitive car and a very competitive driver line up.
“We just want to take session by session, weekend by weekend, learning from the bad days and collecting the points on good days,” concluded Wolff.
