07 November 2023 , 20:33
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Naomi Schiff thinks Toto Wolff may have overreacted to his Mercedes team's terrible weekend at Interlagos.
The Silver Arrows left Sao Paulo with just 11 points to show for their efforts at the Brazilian Grand Prix. They scored seven points in the Sprint despite suffering from severe tyre degradation but Lewis Hamilton added just four more in Sunday's main event, while George Russell retired with an oil temperature problem.
Speaking afterwards, Wolff gave an emotional reaction to what he had watched. Describing it as an "inexcusable performance", he said: "There are no words for that. That car finished second last week and the week before and whatever we did to it was horrible.
"Lewis survived out there but George... I can only feel for the two driving such a miserable thing. So it shows how difficult the car is, it's on a knife's edge. We've got to develop it better for next year because it can't be that in seven days of finishing on the podium with a solid, quick car, you're nowhere.
"We're clearly not world champions on Sprint race weekends. We did some good work here at the track to get it done, but it still doesn't explain what went wrong. The car drove like it was on three wheels and not four."
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Wolff's words paint a bleak picture for Mercedes, not only for the final two races of 2023 but also for next season. But Sky Sports F1 pundit Schiff is not convinced things at the team are as bad as the Austrian suggested.
"Overall, of course, it was not a great weekend for them," she told the Sky F1 podcast. "They lacked pace, they were obviously using up the tyres a lot more than the majority of the teams around them – something that is very uncharacteristic for their car. So they were unable to use the tyres in the way they wanted and, on top of that, they had reliability issues.
"So there were a lot of things going wrong for them. But, if you look back just two races, they had two podiums in two races and that car was moving forward in a positive trajectory. So I think, although it was quite a dramatic result for them, it does just seem like it may be a one-off.
"Maybe they know more than we do – obviously, they do – but, at the end of the day, we've seen that car in the past be very, as Toto described it, on a knife's edge so that working window for them is very narrow. I think that, given the fact it was a Sprint weekend, it's possible that they led themselves in the wrong direction when it comes to setups. I'm pretty sure they're having major debriefs right now.
"But I don't know if we should take Toto's reaction with a bit of a pinch of salt. I think it was quite a pessimistic outlook on a weekend that, of course, didn't go the way they wanted it to at all. But are they really in that dire of a situation right now? I think recent history shows that they aren't in such a terrible place."