George Russell led the opening laps in Canada but had to settle for third
Mercedes Formula 1 boss Toto Wolff says that the team “dreamt” about scoring its first win of the year in Canada but doesn’t yet have a good enough car to do so.
George Russell took pole and led the early wet laps of the race, but he eventually finished third, while team mate Lewis Hamilton climbed from seventh to fourth.
Wolff admitted that while it has improved of late the W15 still isn’t as competitive as it needs to be.
“Maybe for a few minutes we dreamt about it, but in reality, probably not,” he said when asked if the team had a winning car in Montreal.
“I think definitely since Imola we’ve taken the right steps and put parts on the car that were working, and that is something that we were struggling with in the past couple of years.
“And now, directionally, we seem to be adding performance every weekend, and we have new parts coming in Barcelona that should that help us. So I would very much hope that we can continue this positive trajectory.”
By way of caution he added: “I am always a bit worried, when you’re being carried away, that everything seems to fall into place, because this is a difficult sport. We’ve had this positive trajectory now since the last three races, and everything seems to be making much more sense. So the stopwatch will tell us.”
Russell and Hamilton both expressed their frustration after the flag, with the former apologising to the team for an “ugly race”.
However Wolff insisted that they should be satisfied with the results they achieved.
“I think when you finish third and fourth, where we have been coming from, then it’s a positive race,” he said.
“Three and four is much better than we had previously, what we had in the in the last few races. So that’s good.
“But I think both drivers saw that more was [possible], because we could have maybe gained a position or two, and that’s why there is a kind of negative sentiment that prevails.
“But if you would have given them third and fourth before the weekend, probably they would have taken it.”
Wolff downplayed the suggestion that the new front wing first seen in Monaco was key to the recent improvement.
“Sometimes when you bring a highly visible part, like a body work, this is pretty much the talk of what has changed the performance,” he said.
“The truth is we have, over the last three races, brought so many new parts, visible and invisible for the eye, that have contributed milliseconds to more performance.
“And I think this is where those marginal gains can have that positive effect. And that was just a huge effort of the factory. And so I think the wheel has started to get some real motion now.”
Expanding on the recent improvement he said: “There’s no such thing as the silver bullet in F1, and therefore it was a constant work of understanding what was wrong.
“And I know that everybody got tired by this answer, but you can’t reverse engineer the performance of the car and say we’re looking at the Red Bull and this is what we want our car to look like.
“You really need to work your way through the problems. And it didn’t seem to correlate between the tunnel and the track.
“And the car was difficult to drive, ride was not good, we had the bouncing or bottoming coming back and then we had we had a clear indication of what we were missing in the jigsaw. We put the piece in, and I think now it’s fine.”
Adam Cooper F1 