Toto Wolff’s bold statement as Mercedes find ‘missing piece in the jigsaw’

Toto Wolff believes Mercedes have found the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle to unlock the W15’s pace, put it in and “now it’s fine”.

Putting an all-new car on the track, Mercedes reconfigured the sidepod shape, moved the cockpit position 10cm back, and introduced a pushrod rear suspension to replace last year’s pull-rod to name just some of the notable changes.

Toto Wolff: We put the piece in and I think now it’s fine

But while the drivers spoke of a “real” race-car during pre-season testing, they were off the pace of the leading Red Bull in the opening rounds of the season, also falling behind Ferrari and McLaren.

The team revealed correlation issues between the factory and the track with Wolff saying they had found more downforce but that it wasn’t showing in the lap times.

Of late though, there’s a notable upswing in Mercedes’ performance.

Bolting a new front wing onto the W15 at the Monaco Grand Prix, Sky’s Craig Slater reckons it was a “eureka moment” for the F1 team in terms of flexi front wings.

George Russell clinched Mercedes’ first Grand Prix podium of this season at Sunday’s Canadian Grand Prix, a race where Lewis Hamilton was fourth, which was also his best result.

Wolff puts it down to finding that missing piece of the puzzle.

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“There’s no such thing as the silver bullet in Formula 1,” said the Mercedes team principal. “And therefore it was constant work of understanding what was wrong.

“I know that everybody got tired by this answer, but you can’t reverse engineer the performance of the cars. We’re looking at Red Bull and this is what we want our car to look. You really need to work your way through the problems.

“It didn’t seem to correlate between the tunnel and the track, and the car was difficult to drive, the ride was not good, the bouncing or bottoming coming back.

“And then 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.”

Hamilton spoke of the improved ride quality in the build-up to the Canadian Grand Prix with the seven-time World Champion believing that had Mercedes’ biggest improvement this year.

“The biggest improvement I think coming into this year has been ride quality and being able to get the car lower, which is what others have been able to do, he said. “And then stability on entry of corners.

“The car is far more predictable than it ever was, particularly the last couple of years. And particularly this year, it’s a lot more stable, so we can be more committed into the corners.

“But then through corner balance is where we’ve been lacking, where some of the others have really taken a big step. So that’s what we’re trying to work on.”

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