What made Mercedes boss Toto Wolff uneasy about joining Kimi Antonelli on F1 Monaco GP podium - and why he did

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff says he was conflicted about joining Andrea Kimi Antonelli on the podium to celebrate his latest Formula 1 victory at the Monaco Grand Prix.

Antonelli clinched his fifth successive victory with a dominant drive in Monaco to further extend his advantage at the top of the F1 world championship on another tough weekend for his Mercedes team-mate George Russell.

Russell finished outside of the points after copping two penalties and has slipped to third in the drivers’ standings, 68 points behind Antonelli after a second consecutive weekend in which he failed to score.

Mercedes team principal Wolff, who lives in Monaco, admitted celebrating on the podium after such a contrasting race for his drivers left him feeling uneasy, but he revealed it was not the original plan.

"I haven't gone to a podium for 10 years because it's always difficult to balance between one side of the garage being happy, the other one not,” Wolff explained to media including Crash.net.

"Today I couldn't avoid it because the board member that I wanted to go to has said he needs to catch a flight, and then the team said, you've got to go, it's the home place.

"While standing there, I'm always with mixed feelings.”

Wolff conceded that Mercedes had let Russell down for the second consecutive weekend after he suffered a heartbreaking engine failure while leading in Canada at the previous round.

”The Montreal race was his to win. We let him down. In Monaco, probably we could have had a podium if not for the penalty mistake,” Wolff said.

Wolff hailed Antonelli’s performance in Monaco as “unbelievable” and admitted his dominance came as a surprise at a venue where Ferrari had been tipped as favourites.

“We were surprised ourselves about that speed,” Wolff explained. “The laps he was pulling in the times, they were two seconds faster than the McLarens, and a solid plus one second faster than Ferrari. And it was like clockwork. Why that is on a track that we would have not considered to be our strengths before the weekend? I don't know.

"In Monaco, even more than on many other circuits, you need to be one with the car and really in the zone.

“That's also why on George's side, once you lose that confidence, it's very difficult to be fast here. And as for Kimi, we saw in Q2 he was very good already, and then when we went into the last session, I thought, this is going to be impossible.

“Because seeing Charles [Leclerc] flying into the swimming pool section, that is the fastest I've seen a car coming in there and on the limit sideways. And then Max [Verstappen] topped it.

“We were tracing Kimi's lap, we have the live GPS, and it looked like he was just not going to make it, and then out of nowhere, in the last two corners, he made the difference and he was on pole, and looking at the onboard afterwards, it was unbelievable, it was unbelievable that lap.”