"That’s a bit of a slap in the face" - Mercedes boss Toto Wolff disappointed with team's 'no performance' at 2022 F1 French GP qualifying

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff was not happy with the performance shown by the car during the F1 French GP Qualifying. The two Mercedes drivers ended up qualifying only P4 and P6 and were nowhere close to the front runners. What made things even worse was that the McLaren of Lando Norris outqualified George Russell, evidence that the team might just have slipped even further in the pecking order.

Speaking to the media after qualifying, the Mercedes boss wasn't happy and said:

“If you would have told me that we are ending up [there] I would have said that’s not possible. So that’s a bit of a slap in the face. We were slowly but surely working our way back to the front runners and there were good signs in Silverstone. Then we went to Austria, a track where we are normally not competitive at all and we could clearly see the signs why we were not competitive but we were close. It’s a one-minute circuit and we were three tenths off so that was acceptable.”

Wolff continued:

“Then we brought quite a nice update package to Paul Ricard, the track is smooth, off we go, let’s hunt them down. And boom, no performance. Like, no performance and we can’t figure it out, what went wrong. We experimented with rear wings, from almost the biggest we have – which Lewis described as dragging a parachute behind him this morning – to a smaller version which makes us lose too much speed in the corners. Then we experimented with tyre temperatures.”

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Wolff details the erratic behaviour of the Mercedes at Paul Ricard

The Mercedes boss detailed the rather quirky behavior of the car from one session to the next and highlighted the difficulties the team was going through in trying to understand the car. He said:

“We are seeing within one session we go from totally uncompetitive in the first sector to – second run in Q3 – we’re the best in sector one. [From] uncompetitive in sector one, dreadful, to being the quickest in sector one at the end, and the opposite in the last sector.”

He added:

“So clearly there’s something happening, whether it’s wind-affected or tyre-dependant, that is just not working on our car. The car is on the edge and between hero and zero there is just a super-fine margin that we don’t seem to hit and understand.”

It will be interesting to see where both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell will slot in at the end of the French GP.