Mercedes winning 2021 F1 titles would be “against the odds” - Wolff

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has called on his team to “get our act together in every single area” after it failed to win in Formula 1 for the fifth consecutive race.

Connor McDonagh

06 Jul 2021

Toto Wolff (GER) Mercedes AMG F1 Shareholder and Executive Director on the grid. — Toto Wolff (GER) Mercedes AMG F1 Shareholder and Executive Director on the…
© FIA Pool Image for Editorial Use

Red Bull has won the last five races - Verstappen winning four; Perez just the one.

Its impressive form has allowed Verstappen to build a 32-point lead in the drivers’ championship, while Red Bull is 44 points ahead after nine races.

It’s Mercedes’ worst run of form since the turn of the V6 hybrid era as it looks to win an unprecedented eighth consecutive constructors’ championship in 2021.

“No, we never resign any battle, it is the last thing we do,” Wolff said. “If I have to resign you will see me going down the fire with the hand and the sword straight up, is that how you say it? I don’t know. I am always a sceptical person, half empty glass, but in that case I am seeing the positives. And the positives are there are 13-14 races to go, we are one DNF away from Red Bull, no more, and we have lost more points than we should have lost to our own mistakes, so this is on.

“Clearly in Austria, in the last few races, we didn’t have the performance we must have in order to fight RB and we are very aware of that and we need to just get our act together in every single area and hopefully perform better on the other tracks.”

Wolff believes Mercedes coming out on top to win both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships in 2021 would be “against the odds” given Red Bull's current advantage.

“I think we lost more ground in previous races than we did today [at the Austrian GP],” Wolff added. “Of course losing 13-14 points is not great, but this is still the long game. It is against the odds for us now and that’s clear as they have an overall performance advantage and you could see that today, but it is like I said before, all these years I tried to keep our feet on the ground by not being carried away by performance and now I need to do the opposite.

“We are not going to give up at any time of the season unless it is not mathematically possible any more to win this championship, so that’s why we need to see these things optimistically rather than pessimistically like we’ve done in the past, and there’s things to take away even from days such as today.”