Wolff ranks his Mercedes: 'Between these teams we stand'

A victory in Bahrain was not possible for Mercedes. For that, Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing were (again) too good. The German team also narrowly missed the podium, with George Russell in fifth place in the Bahrain Grand Prix. Yet a true optimist also saw a bright spot: Mercedes finished four seconds closer to Verstappen than a year ago on the same track.

Toto Wolff was one such person who mostly saw the positives, after the first race in a long F1 season. "I think testing was pretty good for us," the Austrian told GPblog and others. "The performances on Thursday and Friday were encouraging. The car was stable and was good. The drivers liked it. And today, when we started the race on the soft tyre, everything was pretty much to plan."

So much for the good news. Despite the pleasant temperatures in Bahrain, at one point, the engines had to cool more than expected. "We can't understand yet where that came from. We had one of our customer teams, Williams, who had the same issue, the other two did not, and that was unexpected. And from then on, if you switch three, four tens of power unit performance off and then you have to lift and coast on top of that, I think at times we couldn’t take from what the car had in it, and therefore it just wasn't great fun."

So Red Bull was well out of reach in Bahrain. As to whether the Austrians can be caught up at some point, Wolff says: "The extra performance and their machine are just great. But I think everybody else, you saw the differences between the Ferraris, and I believe that pretty much the group, Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes, we are probably in a similar ballpark. We just need to look at ourselves and get on top of our problems, and if we can manage our racing better, we will be racing those guys."