Toto Wolff felt the Monaco Grand Prix ended up being a case of damage limitation for the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team, with neither Valtteri Bottas nor Lewis Hamilton finding their way onto the podium.
With Scuderia Ferrari taking first and second to assume considerable leads in both championships, and Head of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport Wolff knows a lot of analysing will need to be done to understand why the team struggled so badly throughout the whole weekend in the principality.
Bottas was able to keep Max Verstappen behind him for the duration of the race but fell behind the second Red Bull Racing machine of Daniel Ricciardo during the pit stop cycle, while Hamilton climbed to seventh from thirteenth on the grid.
“Ferrari dominated the race today and first of all we must congratulate them for that performance,” said Wolff. “But our job is to analyse what happened to us this weekend and then to understand it.
“Today was a day of damage limitation and the drivers did that as well as they possibly could have done. Valtteri drove a controlled and consistent race. He was unfortunate to lose P3 at the pit stops but, with two cars, Red Bull had the chance to pincer him and they made that work. We successfully covered Verstappen but then Riccardo was able to unleash some lap times that we just couldn’t match.
“As for Lewis, he did a great job to take every opportunity that came his way and climb to P7, which was the maximum of our expectations for him today. There were also glimpses of competitive lap times during the later part of the race on the Supersoft tyre.”
Wolff felt the team suffered all weekend to get their tyre into the correct working window, which turned out to be their biggest weakness that they will have to overcome ahead of the next race of the season in Canada.
“The reality is that we were in and out of the working window of the tyres this weekend and that made our performance too inconsistent overall,” said Wolff. “We have limited the damage and need to work hard to understand our weakness and come back much stronger in Montreal in two weeks’ time.
