Toto Wolff: Mercedes can’t win yet

Toto Wolff admits Mercedescan’t think of a win yet‘ as he was almost a second slower on the lap than the Ferrari of winner Charles Leclerc at the Bahrain Grand Prix.

Lewis Hamilton might have been on the podium on Sunday, but that was clearly down to Red Bull’s bad luck – or lack of credibility as you like to call it – after Max Ferstappen and Sergio Perez crashed through injury in the final laps. .

Wolf also doesn’t shy away from saying that Mercedes have the third fastest car in the field and that the 27 points the team won in the first race of the season is no guarantee of winning the championship: “It’s still too early for title fights. From today’s perspective, it seems very far-fetched to think that we can claim any of the championships. But if I just look at it as a race weekend, we probably got the most points we could get and we have to go from there. Every weekend counts and right now they are being considered as individual events because realistically you can’t think of winning when you’re third in speed“.

Explaining the strategy of only driving Hamilton on hard tires for 16 laps, Wolf added: “In a way it was a new situation for all of us because we were ‘lost’ between positions 3-4 and 6 so everyone can experiment more in that position and I think the hard tire experiment was worth it. It was very different from all other pioneering strategies and obviously didn’t work at all, so it takes more miles, more laps, more understanding.“.