Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff provided insight into his recent team radio intervention during the Austrian Grand Prix, aiming to “calm things down” during a challenging event for the team.
Despite starting in P5, Lewis Hamilton faced difficulties in maintaining pace against the formidable Red Bull and Ferrari drivers, even encountering difficulty fending off McLaren’s Lando Norris.
In the heat of the moment, Hamilton’s determination led to several track limit violations, leading to a time penalty and numerous frustrated radio messages from the British driver.
Witnessing his driver’s evident frustration, Wolff opted for a rare radio communication to support Hamilton in regaining focus and composure for the remainder of the race.
“I wanted to just make sure that we were making the best out of the package and just giving it the best shot that we had,” Wolff remarked when speaking to the media.
“But only for the best interests of the drivers and the team, and sometimes you have moments where you need to calm things down.
Despite having high hopes for the race at the Red Bull Ring with their recently-updated W14 car, Mercedes experienced a disappointing outcome.
However, the inclusion of an additional Sprint race, the team only managed to accumulate eleven points throughout the race weekend. This marked their lowest points tally of the season.
“It was a bruising day. We couldn’t make the car quick. We saw it from Friday onwards that we were lacking a couple of tenths or a bit more,” Wolff added.
“I think the swings are quite interesting. One weekend it’s us who are the first challenger [to Red Bull], and then it’s Ferrari, and then it’s Aston Martin, and this time we were on the back-end of the group.
“We’re sitting there for 90 minutes trying to optimise the strategy or getting the best of the drivers, but there’s just no inherent pace. It was a tough 90 minutes for us.
“I think we were predicting that Montreal would not be ideal and it was surprisingly good, then in Austria we thought that the high-speed [performance] would save our non-performance in the lower speed [corners], but it never did.
“The car was never in the right place. We suffered from all of the conditions, from understeer to oversteer. It was never any good.”
