Toto Wolff rubbishes “nonsense” claims of Mercedes ‘crisis meeting’

Toto Wolff has set the record straight on reports Mercedes staged a “crisis meeting” following the Belgian Grand Prix.

Mercedes have experienced a worrying drop off in form since claiming a 1-3 finish at the Canadian Grand Prix and suspect recent changes made to the W16 have made it worse.

The Silver Arrows are currently in the process of retracing their steps in a bid to identity - and cure - the reasons behind their recent performance slump.

After finishing a distant fifth in Belgium, George Russell suggested a “big meeting” would be taking place in the week before this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix.

But Mercedes team principal Wolff has dismissed suggestions of an emergency meeting taking place and explained its true nature.

"That’s always such nonsense - this talk of a 'crisis meeting,'" Wolff told Sky Germany.

"We have meetings every week to assess where the car stands and what we can improve. And one of those meetings was last week, exactly as planned, with the drivers.

“We do that regularly, every few months. That was the 'big' meeting. And it was very interesting.”

Speaking to media including Crash.net at the Hungaroring, team representative and chief communications officer Bradley Lord insisted the meeting was not a direct response to Mercedes’ recent performance slide.

“So we have a quarterly, what's called a driver development meeting, where the drivers and a broader cross-section of the technical side of the team meet,” Bradley explained in response to a question by Crash.net.

“That was planned and had been planned for many months for Monday. So it happened to coincide rather than it being a hastily-called crisis meeting or everything else that we've read.

“That meeting took place and rather than being in the detail of each race weekend, it's a chance sort of every couple of months for everyone to step back and just take a look at the evolution performance over a number of races.

“So that's what that was and that's what took place. It's been in the diary for a long time rather than being something that was assembled in response to the Spa weekend.”

George Russell clarifies meeting comments

Russell claimed the comments he made at Spa were “exaggerated”.

"I think my comments about a big meeting were probably exaggerated a bit because we talk monthly with everyone back at the factory," he stressed. "We talk, obviously, weekly with the people who are here on the race-team side of things, so it's nothing abnormal.

“That meeting was actually planned probably three or four weeks ago, just as all of these meetings are. But clearly our performance as a team has gone backwards in the last six or seven races, and we're trying to unpick why that may have been.

"I think there's a number of factors at play. Obviously, we struggle a bit in the hotter conditions - Spa wasn’t hot, but generally we struggle in the hotter conditions. We're now in summer; start of the season was spring, and we brought some little things with updates, and we think that may not have been performing as we hoped.

"So we'll revert back on some small items. I think we've potentially just lost our way slightly and are just going to go back to basics, focus on the main parts of the car and see where that takes us."