Toto Wolff says Mercedes “needs the A-game to win the A-championship”

© Steve Etherington for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.

Mercedes Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin and team boss Toto Wolff comment on why Mercedes failed to beat Max Verstappen at the Dutch Grand Prix.

Lewis Hamilton was not able to beat Max Verstappen at the Dutch Grand Prix and ultimately had to settle for second place.

Andrew Shovlin explains Mercedes has been on the back foot against Red Bull ever since Lewis missed out on most of FP2 due to “losing power”.

“All we tried to do was put a bit of long-run work into Saturday because he hadn’t really done any long runs,” said Shovlin.

“Consequently, he’d also missed another opportunity to try that Soft tyre that you can’t get back. But you’ve seen with all the red flags, it’s very difficult to run the sessions as planned.

“Even going into qualifying, because we did the medium [in Q1] and then we were on cold tyres because of a red flag going into Q2, it was quite late before we actually had a run where it was hot tyres out of the box that were fresh,” Shovlin said.

“So we were just playing catch-up a bit. It was encouraging to see that we could get close [in qualifying]. I know Max didn’t have a perfect lap.

“But the weekend, we’ve been a little bit behind the curve and trying to catch up, and need to get everything right to beat them.”

Shovlin reveals Mercedes realised upon arriving at Zandvoort that they needed a different balance for their car, than the one they expected while doing simulator work at Brackley.


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“The banked corners are very unusual, and certainly the sequence of Turn 2-3 is quite tricky,” the Briton explained.

“There may be elements that are quite specific to our car that make it difficult. But also when you’re doing the simulator work, once you know a circuit, you know how to set up the simulator to replicate it very effectively.

“The balance we had on the simulator was quite different to the one that we had when we came here and started running the car on Friday. And that was why we had to move it a bit more in terms of set-up than we do normally.

“I think with a bit more knowledge, next year it will be easier, but some of it was just that coming to a new track, there’s a lot that you don’t know.

“And that just left us with a bit more ground to make up than we would have liked,” concluded Shovlin.

Taking everything into account Toto Wolff said Mercedes needs to be better prepared in the future.

“We just need to be on our A-game all the time,” the Austrian said.

“And with these little lapses, with not being able to complete FP2 in a proper way, as a starting point, and then in the execution of the race itself, we just need to be…

“It needs the A-game to win the A-championship,” concluded Wolff.

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