Time for Wolff to step down? 'Logical question, but I don't feel that way'

Mercedes had a disastrous weekend in Australia. Lewis Hamilton had to abandon the race with a mechanical problem, George Russell crashed on the last lap. Zero points in Melbourne, and in the constructors' championship McLaren already have more than twice as many points as team principal and shareholder's, Toto Wolff's team. Who admitted after the race to having thought quite a bit about whether his staying on is the right thing for the team at the moment.

A complete disaster is how the Australian Grand Prix could best be described for Mercedes. To give you an idea: at the moment Russell hit the wall and saw his race ended prematurely, the Briton was eighty seconds behind the leader. Note: the leader was in a Ferrari, not in a Red Bull, when the gap is usually even greater. Wolff's conclusion that at times during the race Mercedes "massively lacked pace" is a sore one for the factory team.

Wolff wants to punch himself on the nose

Mercedes' lap times, for example, were initially a second a lap slower than McLaren. "Suddenly in the last one, when we went for it, the lap times were competitive," Wolff said. "We started the season in the belief that this car is better than it was last year. And then you look at last year and look at these guys, the McLaren crashed out and, and Sainz was forced and got relegated to outside of the top 10 because of the penalty. But on the road, he was fourth and McLaren was 17th, 18th, 19th. And they are 40 seconds ahead of us."

"So, obviously on one side, I wanted to punch myself on the nose, but on the other side, it is also a testimony of that when you get things right, you can turn it around pretty quickly and you're just going to continue to believe. But at the moment it is very, very tough time," Wolff says.

Wolff looks himself in the mirror every day

The Austrian was at the root of all the Mercedes team's huge successes, but for more than two years he has failed to make the Mercedes a frontrunner again. There are sometimes open doubts about whether Wolff is still the right man to lead Mercedes. It is a question Wolff understands. "You know, that as a corner of this business, I need to make sure that my contribution is, is positive and the creative. So I would be the first one to say, if somebody has a better idea, tell me because I'm interested to turn this team around as quickly as possible."

"But, you know, we have a physics problem but not a philosophical or organisational problem. It's just, we don't understand some of the behaviours of the car from that in the past, they would have always understood. So come back to your question. I look myself in the mirror every single day about everything I do. And if I believe don’t, I should ask the manager question or the trainer question. I think it's a fair question, but it's not what I feel at the moment, that I should do."

Wolff cannot get out at Mercedes

For Wolff, Mercedes are also more than just another team. It is a company he co-owns, which he himself has made a success of. "It's not the manager question in terms of this is my job and I'll stop the job and then somebody else is doing the job and I'll go to Chelsea or to Liverpool or over to Ferrari. I haven't got the choice, which is also unfortunate. Not the contractor or employee that says I've had enough of this. My hands, the wheel keeps spinning and I can't jump out," Wolff said.

What continues to give Wolff hope for better results is that he does not detect dogmatism within his organisation. Instead, he sees an open working environment, where people dare to be critical of themselves, but that simply the right solutions have not yet been found. "It's so tough in my career, in everything I've done before, in finance and investments, that you know which screws to turn. You know, sometimes it takes time because back in my Williams days and I knew what was missing. But here I don't think we're missing something."

"It is just a complication of of what's happening with the car that we can't see. And it's like an on-off switch. And then you see the progress that McLean and Ferrari have made, and this is the difference between last year and this year. This was a pretty good weekend for us last year. I just saw the clip before. Because I forgot about for a couple of past races we were leading at the beginning one and two. So, we got a really dig deep because of this is brutally painful."