Wolff defends Hamilton after Sargeant near-miss

Toto Wolff has defended Lewis Hamilton over the Logan Sargeant high-speed near-miss incident in Saudi Arabian Grand Prix practice.

The incident with Sargeant happened in FP2 as Hamilton blocked the Williams at Turn 9 at high-speed.

Hamilton insisted that he had slowed to let Carlos Sainz's Ferrari by and that he was simply not aware of the presence of Sargeant as he immediately offer apologies.

The American was forced to the run-off to avoid a collision, with Hamilton issued a warning by the stewards with the team fined €15,000, as Wolff defended Hamilton, who would go onto finish eighth in a tricky session, complaining of a lack of rear-grip.

Mercedes' mixed day

"I saw the moment, but I don't know if Lewis got the message that Sargeant was coming," Wolff told Sky Germany.

"In any case, it was dangerous and it could have resulted in a big crash, but nobody does that on purpose, especially not Lewis."

As for Mercedes' day, Wolff commited to changes for qualifying following the different set-ups between Hamilton and Russell.

"If you listen to the drivers, you hear that the car is not perfect and that they have balance and bouncing problems," he said.

"They don't have confidence, but I think that's true for everyone at the moment, you can hear that on the radio.

"We drove with two totally different set-ups and it turned out that with Lewis it doesn't work at all. We are going to change that towards qualifying.

"The car is getting faster and faster in terms of lap time, so we have to think carefully about what we do for qualifying.

"It's hard to say where we stand. I think eight cars will be very close together, there might again be only three-tenths between those positions."