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Toto Wolff was defiant about his Mercedes team’s world championship chances after back-to-back Red Bull Ring weekends of what he described as damage limitation, calling on his team to “get our act together in every single area” to hit back.
Lewis Hamilton slid to 32 points behind Max Verstappen in the drivers’ championship, while Red Bull now lead the constructors’ standings by 44 points after Mercedes faced one of its biggest pace deficits to Red Bull of the season so far.
But despite the setback and a run of five consecutive Red Bull wins, Wolff resolved to focus on the positives.
“We never resign any battle, it’s the last thing we do,” said Wolff when asked if he was resigned to fighting a rearguard battle.
“I’m always a sceptical person, half-empty glass, but I’m seeing the positives. And the positives are, it’s 14 races to go, we are one DNF away from Red Bull and we’ve lost more points than we maybe should have to our own mistakes. So this [the championship] is on.
“Clearly in Austria or the last few races, we didn’t have the performance that we must in order to fight Red Bull.
“We are very aware of that and we need to just get our act together overall in every single area and hopefully perform better on the other tracks.”
Mercedes is facing its toughest world championship fight of the 1.6-litre V6 turbo hybrid era. Although it has been behind at this stage of the season before, notably in 2018 when Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari had a slender advantage after the ninth race of the season in Austria, Red Bull has a more decisive performance advantage.
Wolff describes being the hunter rather than the hunted as an “enjoyable life experiment” and backed his team to emerge from the experience stronger.
“It’s a very enjoyable life experiment that I see ourselves in,” said Wolff.
“We have a great mindset, and the values that we have are the immune system of the team.
“And the immune system means you need to function when things are going bad and after seven consecutive championships we are in a situation that we are fighting a tough fight battle, against all odds as it stands.
“And that is, I wouldn’t say enjoyable is the right word, but that is the new experience that’s going to make us stronger in the long term.
“Every day there is a new learning experience and every day makes us stronger even if we have so many consecutive weekends that are tough. I think we will look back many years from now and say, ‘that was necessary’.”
Wolff also described Bottas and Hamilton finishing second and fourth in the Austrian Grand prix as a good result and felt the performance relative to Red Bull was more encouraging than the previous weekend.
But he made quite a stretch when he talked up the race pace that Mercedes could have shown had both drivers not been stuck behind McLaren driver Lando Norris early on, in terms of being able to challenge Red Bull, as there was no indication of such speed.
“It is a good result because if we wouldn’t have been stuck behind the McLaren at the beginning, where we lost chunks of time, we would have been racing him,” said Wolff.
“I’m not sure that would have been enough to win the race but the race pace was there and would have been good. And you can see that particularly also with Valtteri’s pace, once Lewis lost downforce the pace was there.
“In a way, that Sunday was much better than last Sunday in terms of performance of the car.”
