Key Mercedes F1 weakness identified as advantage 'not enough to cruise to the sunset'

Toto Wolff says Mercedes has to address its poor starts as it does not have a big enough advantage to allow its Formula 1 drivers “to cruise into the sunset.”

Andrea Kimi Antonelli and George Russell have suffered from consistently poor starts all season thus far.

While they have been able to recover and win all but one race this year, in Miami last weekend the Italian made it to the flag in front of Lando Norris with a slender margin.

Antonelli had bad getaways in both the sprint and the main race in Miami, and Wolff made it clear that it’s the team’s responsibility to improve them.

“It's not at all on him,” he said. “I think today and yesterday was a team mistake. We all know it's just not good enough.

“We're not doing a good enough job in giving them a tool in their hands, whether it's clutch and grip estimates. And we are the only ones who, let's say, don't get that right now for a few races.

“And we just have to dig even deeper and to try to understand how we can fix that. Because the gaps are not big enough to cruise into the sunset, and therefore you can't be missing starts.”

McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari all brought major upgrade packages to Miami, but Mercedes has kept its power dry until the next race in Canada.

With four teams in the mix, Mercedes was under pressure throughout the weekend.

“If there's one thing in person that says complaints about the race today, I think they should hide, honestly,” said Wolff.

“Now, obviously this track is a little bit easier. It's not so energy starved. There's good games and there's bad games. So I think that was great advertising for F1.

“When it comes to the competitive order, we're still holding on to it,” he said of the Miami weekend. “But the McLarens have made a big step. Red Bull, pure pace massive yesterday in qualifying. I guess the strategy today didn't really play well for them.

“And in that respect, it wasn't easy at all today. So we've just got to keep developing, because this is a development race throughout the season, and see how our upgrades are going to work in Montreal."

Wolff explained how the team bounced back after a below par sprint by adjusting its energy deployment strategy.

"I think that we over-complicated our life with where we wanted to put the car in the power unit, and in terms of energy management,” he said.

“And we realised that we just needed to go back to something more conventional.

“You saw we lost three or four tenths against the car and most of the others in sector one. We fixed that, and that brought the performance back.”