Mercedes motorsport boss Toto Wolff has revealed the race during the 2018 Formula 1 season where he “felt the momentum’ swing in his team’s favour.
The German manufacturer made it five consecutive double championship successes this year with Lewis Hamilton securing a fifth world championship, tieing with another Mercedes legend in Juan Manuel Fangio.
It came after a fierce battle with Ferrari for the first half of the season with actually saw the Scuderia leading at the summer break after inflicting what Wolff considered the most painful loss of the year at Silverstone.
“The very difficult one was losing the British Grand Prix. As you can imagine, it’s Lewis’ home Grand Prix and our team is based in Brackley,” he said at the FIA gala this past weekend.
“Losing on a track where we’ve always performed well was very difficult but we collected all the energy within the organisation and came back strong.”
The weather intervened in Germany and Hungary to give Hamilton two unexpected wins but it was a key victory two races later than really put Mercedes in control.
“For me, the turning point was Monza because we were able to win in Italy, and from then on we had a few Grands Prix where we were extremely strong,” Wolff stated.
“We were extremely strong in Singapore which was not our favourite track in the past, and we were able to just have a really good car and Lewis had an unbelievable lap to qualify on pole.
“This is where I felt the momentum go in our direction.”
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While much of the attention was on Hamilton, teammate Valtteri Bottas was making different headlines, eventually ending 2018 as the first Mercedes driver since 2012 to not win a race over a full season.
Wolff, however, insists the Finn played as big a role as anyone in the team’s success.
“We wouldn’t have won the Drivers’ Championship and the Constructors’ Championship without Valtteri,” he said.
“Valtteri, even with his bad luck, did never allow the spirit and the mindset to drop within the organisation. He was always capable to maintain the high spirits.
“You see drivers when they lose the ability to win the championship the whole thing goes really down the drain. It becomes negative, it becomes dysfunctional. Valtteri until the very end kept us in a positive place.”
