Wolff thinks Mercedes could have kept up with Verstappen: 'Halved the gap'

Toto Wolff reckons Mercedes have halved the gap to Red Bull Racing and Ferrari. In the Austrian Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell finished well clear of the leaders, but the Mercedes team boss believes his team could have matched Max Verstappen's pace if the drivers had a better starting position.

Hamilton got a podium out of it, but without the crashes of Sergio Perez and Carlos Sainz, it most likely would not have been there. According to Wolff, the Mercedes drivers' double crash in qualifying was the reason Russell and Hamilton could not fight for better positions.

Indeed, without the crashes in qualifying, the Mercedes team boss thinks his drivers could have kept up with Verstappen's pace. "I think we’ve halved the gap over the last few months, we understand better, but we’re still third, fourth – we’re somewhere right in the middle of nowhere," Wolff said in conversation with Formula1.com.

Nevertheless, the Austrian says he is trying to take the 'positives' out of the race. "If we would have – which we didn’t – started right in the top six, probably we could’ve held on to Max and not been so far away," Wolff said.