Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff says the team's culture is its biggest asset as the Silver Arrows seek to get back to winning ways. After a near-clean sweep of titles between 2014 and 2021, Mercedes have slipped back this year as Ferrari and Red Bull instead compete for the championship, but the Silver Arrows appear to have made progress in recent races, with Lewis Hamilton and George Russell finishing a season's-best second and third at the French Grand Prix. Mercedes' flawless reliability has kept them within striking distance of Ferrari in the Constructors' Championship, with the Scuderia now only 44 points ahead after a series of retirements and driver errors in races. By contrast, Hamilton and Russell are yet to suffer any mechanical retirements, and the duo's only driving mistakes this season have come in qualifying for the Austrian Grand Prix, prompting Wolff to talk up the team's culture as the driving force behind their push for success.
Wolff: It's the immune system of the team
"I think the biggest asset is the culture that we have in the team," Wolff told media including RacingNews365.com . "For me, it's the immune system of the team. It keeps us working with the right mindset and spirit when it's difficult. "The drivers are part of our culture and our mindset, and they very rarely make mistakes, they squeeze the utmost out of the car. "They're clever, we've seen that [at the French Grand Prix], and just never let go. "And then reliability has been a highlight so far. I think reliability is strong, and we are delivering solid work, it's just that we need to understand how to unlock more performance in qualifying and the initial stages of the race."
Wolff: No 'holy cows' in search of peak performance
While Mercedes have closed the gap on the leading cars in recent weeks, the Silver Arrows still qualified around one second adrift of pole-sitter Charles Leclerc at Paul Ricard, prompting Russell to suggest that the Silver Arrows ought to tinker with their set-ups less over race weekends. For his part, Wolff suggested that every lap completed was valuable for gathering data to help Mercedes understand how to narrow their performance deficit. "With every lap, we collect more data and we understand little bits of it, putting the pieces of the puzzle together," said Wolff. "There are no holy cows that we're not looking at [to improve the car]. "But we're just not yet clear what it is that holds us back."
Most read
