Wolff Calls Hamilton's Apology 'Step Too Far' As He Teases Upgrades For Miami
F1Tuesday, 23 April 2024 at 02:00
Team principal Toto Wolff revealed that his Mercedes plans to introduce some promising upgrades during the race weekend in Miami.
The weekend at Shanghai International Circuit was pretty mixed for Mercedes. On the one hand, Lewis Hamilton scored their best result of the season during the sprint race on Saturday when he crossed the finish line in P2.
On the other hand, the seven-time world champion's qualifying and race went much worse, and even though George Russell had a slightly better race on Sunday, it was still clear that the German team lacked pace compared to their rivals.
Speaking to the media after the race, the team principal of Silver Arrows, Toto Wolff, admitted there was an overall lack of pace but suggested his team is working on that and might improve soon as they plan to introduce a new upgrade during the next race in Miami.
"Lacking pace. We have got to dig deep. We have got something coming for Miami that looks like a good step, let's see where that brings us out."
One small problem that the German team might encounter is not having enough time to dial in setups and understand how their upgraded cars behave during the single practice session that they will have in Miami.
Aston Martin brought upgrades to the 2023 United States Grand Prix, which was a sprint weekend, and paid a huge price for not having enough time to play with their setup.
Although rules have changed since then, and teams are now allowed to change their setups even later in the sprint weekend, Mercedes still risks going underprepared for the sprint qualifying on Friday and sprint race on Saturday.
Concerning what happened during the Chinese Grand Prix, Wolff suggested the same thing that the seven-time World Champion said: the team didn't choose the right setup.
"It's not an OK car. We can see what the mistakes are on the car. We wanted to go a bit more aggressive to see if it was something so different we needed to do on that car and you can see Lewis today took it on him, that was maybe a step too far."
"The race car was not fast. You hear him [Hamilton] saying the car doesn't turn and this is what we can see in the data. It wasn't the right thing to do."
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