Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff revealed that their performance at the French Grand Prix is “a slap in the face”.
Mercedes were expected to be among the favorites at the Circuit Paul Ricard because of the track’s nature. However, it turned out not to be the case. The Silver Arrows were around a second slower than the leaders the whole weekend. Lewis Hamilton and George Russell ended qualifying 4th and 6th respectively.
“If you would have told me that we are ending up [there], I would have said that’s not possible. So that’s a bit of a slap in the face,” Wolff commented on Mercedes’ performance.
“We were slowly but surely working our way back to the front-runners and there were good signs in Silverstone. Then we went to Austria, a track where we are normally not competitive at all and we could clearly see the signs why we were not competitive but we were close. It’s a one-minute circuit and we were three tenths off, so that was acceptable.
“Then we brought quite a nice update package to Paul Ricard, the track is smooth, off we go, let’s hunt them down. And boom, no performance. Like, no performance and we can’t figure it out, what went wrong.”
