Wolff says 'everything making more sense' for Mercedes after strong weekend in Montreal

Toto Wolff believes that things are “making much more sense” for Mercedes off the back of a positive weekend for the squad at the Canadian Grand Prix, with the team boss explaining how they approached the process of tackling the issues that blighted them earlier in the season.

Having endured two challenging campaigns in 2022 and 2023, the Silver Arrows’ problems looked to have continued into the start of 2024 as they struggled to get to grips with the W15.

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However, the team’s prospects seem to have improved during recent weekends, culminating in their first pole position and podium of the year with George Russell in Montreal, while Lewis Hamilton also scored his best race result of the season so far in P4.

Reflecting on whether this is the most confident that he has felt since the beginning of 2022 that the outfit can maintain this progress with no further obstacles ahead, Wolff sounded an optimistic but cautious note.

“I’m always a bit worried when you get carried away that everything seems to now fall into place, because this is a difficult sport!” the Team Principal said after the race at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.

“We’ve had this positive trajectory since the last three races and everything seems to be making much more sense. The stopwatch will tell us.”

In the early stages of the season, Mercedes appeared to be struggling to match the data from their simulations with how the car actually performed on track. Asked whether this side of things had now been addressed, Wolff gave an insight into how the team had set about tackling their problems.

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“There is no such thing as a silver bullet in Formula 1, therefore it was a constant work of understanding what was wrong,” he explained.

“I know that everybody got tired by this answer, but you can’t reverse engineer the performance of the car and say, ‘We’re looking at a Red Bull and this is what we want our car to be.’

“You really need to work your way through the problems. It didn’t seem to correlate between the tunnel and the track, and the car was difficult to drive, we had the bouncing coming back. Then we had a clear indication of what we were missing in the jigsaw, and we put that piece in.”

Now the focus is on maintaining the positive run of form into the next event on the calendar, the Spanish Grand Prix, where Mercedes will bring further upgrades following on from the new front wing first introduced in Monaco.

“I think definitely since Imola we’ve taken the right steps and put parts on the car that were working,” said Wolff. “That is something that we were struggling with in the past couple of years.

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“We have new parts coming in Barcelona. That should help us, so I would very much hope that we can continue this positive trajectory.”

Pushed on how big those updates might be, Wolff added: “I can’t tell you. Sometimes when things interact well with each other, the overall flow structure becomes more efficient and you’re able to optimise the ride height.

"Bit by bit we’ve added more performance. [It will be] another step in Barcelona, and hopefully we will see it on the stopwatch.”