Toto Wolff outlines Mercedes’ position ahead of Bahrain GP – ‘What the heck can we do’ | F1 | Sport
Wolff said he was struggling to sleep as he battled with how to turn around Mercedes from ahead of the weekend’s opening race. He warned Mercedes’ baseline was “pretty low” after a horrid opening to the 2022 season.
Lewis Hamilton and George Russell both struggled to light up the timesheets throughout practice to raise concerns over their performance. Toto Wolff said: “Well I had nights I’ve slept better.
“I keep waking up and thinking ‘what the heck can we do’. But there are a lot of clever people who are thinking about where we can really tackle our problems.
He added: “From a technological standpoint you set your expectations, if you don’t meet them, that’s the new baseline. At the moment the baseline is pretty low and we just have to approach it with humility and work our way out of it.”
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He said: “We’ve had small problems in the past, relatively, compared to this year, we’ve had much much smaller problems. We’re faced with much much bigger problems this year.
“Everything we do to try and fix it doesn’t really change that. It appears like it’s going to be a longer-term fix, nothing in the short term.” His new team-mate Russell also warned “the pace is not there” and suggested the team were a “long way off the pace”
He said: “We’re certainly not where we want to be. I think we made a bit of progress solving some issue but the pace just is not there at all at the moment so we need to really go in on the data tonight to understand, we’re both struggling a bit with the car. We’re a long way off the pace of Red Bull, Ferrari.”
