Mercedes boss Toto Wolff admits the team was “bruised” after a dreadful home race at the German Grand Prix on Sunday.
Having led a 1-2 early on, the first switch to slicks and back to intermediates put pay to their victory chances with a rare mistake from Lewis Hamilton dropping him down the order.
A crash for Valtteri Bottas while chasing Lance Stroll put the cherry on the not-so-pretty cake but, like after Austria, Wolff only had one response.
“I think everybody’s pretty bruised,” he conceded initially.
“Because it’s one thing if a race goes against you and you’re losing a car, or you’re crashing out, or you haven’t done your best, but with both cars, not in the points, one out, one DNF…
“These are the days that made us strong in the past, these are the days where you analyse and you scrutinise more than you have done in the past.
“You never go home and say, ‘Why the f**k did we win?’. You go home, ‘Why the f**k did we lose?’.
“And this is certainly going to be the discussion that we’re going to have, and we’re united in the pain, as we are united in the joy of winning.”
Also Read:
- Wolff critical of Bottas, unhappy with Mercedes pace at the German GP
- Hamilton keen to move on after ‘worst day in a long time’ at Hockenheim
- Bottas should have been more patient before German GP crash
As for Hamilton, his weekend wasn’t helped by illness as he dropped to an 11th place finish – which later became ninth after both Alfa Romeo’s were penalised post-race.
And he largely echoed the comments of his team boss.
“It’s massively disappointing and upsetting for all of us to be leaving a Grand Prix and I was eight seconds in the lead at one point and had it all under control,” he told Crash.net.
“Things are going to be thrown at you the whole time in conditions like this, but I think it was like one domino after another and like snakes and ladders and I kept hitting the snakes.
“But the thing is we win and lose together,” he added. “It just shows you how easy it is to get a weekend wrong and the processes wrong but we stay united and we pull together and we regroup.
“We were still doing pretty awesome until the domino effect today so we need to take the positives from this weekend and leave all the negatives out.
“It’s only one race, and we keep moving forwards.”
