Toto Wolff sounds ALARM over Mercedes communication failures

Wolff op de Red Bull Ring — Photo: © LAT Images

Belgian Grand Prix

Wolff sounds ALARM over Mercedes communication failures

The Mercedes team principal is concerned with interactions between his team and its drivers

Lauren Sneath

Tuesday 1 August 2023 20:57

Toto Wolff has admitted that Mercedes need to work on their communication with drivers during qualifying sessions after a disappointing result for Lewis Hamilton and George Russell in the Spa sprint shootout.

Though the team have come on leaps and bounds since a painful 2022 season, team principal Wolff wants to refine lines of communication to ensure strong results each week.

And during the sprint shootout on Saturday, it was a lack of communication that tripped the team up, according to the Austrian.

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Hamilton was fastest overall following the first run in SQ3, but converting that result into a pole position for the sprint proved tricky when he ended up starting his final lap right behind his team-mate.

During that lap, Russell then locked up at La Source and lost pace, holding up Hamilton. Effectively, their charge for pole position was ruined.

Lewis Hamilton races around Spa with a pair of intermediate tyres during the Belgian Grand Prix Sprint

Wolff was concerned that the team are squandering Hamilton’s pace. He said after the session: “When you see that he [Hamilton] was leading the pack before that last lap, it is clearly a problem for all of us.

“It's not that he's missed out on pole or a front row, but it is that the team has missed out on it, and it is all of us together.

“It's really a constant development and learning process. And I think with the badness that happened, I'm sure with what we discussed afterwards we've made a step in correcting that.

“But we've tripped up a few times now and we just need to up our game.”

Wolff: We need to ramp up our game

The team principal highlighted a need to avoid the ‘tangles’ of the kind experienced in the shootout, and felt communication was what was letting the team down.

He said: “I think between the drivers, both of them, and the interaction with the team, we just need to ramp up our game.

“In these situations where it's about crossing the line, in tough conditions, we have just got to have some precision.

“Very quickly you can look very good and very intelligent, and then very bad. To give you an example, if these two didn’t tangle the way they did, Max would have missed the final lap.

“But having said that, it’s not that driver we should be focused on, but ourselves. We had the time to give them both a proper launch.

“And Lewis was on provisional pole the lap before and then ended up P7. So for all of us together, that shouldn't be happening.”