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Mercedes F1 team boss and co-owner Toto Wolff says his team’s form in the last two races is unacceptable and they will soon have to return to their usual level if they want to fight for the title with Red Bull. Mercedes won just seven points in Monaco with Hamilton’s seventh place and a point for the fastest lap, and in Baku, they experienced a real disaster as they were left without points for the first time after 55 races.
Hamilton and Bottas looked slow all weekend, and although Hamilton found speed ahead of qualifying and was in a battle to win at the restart of the race, he spilled everything with braking too late on the first corner and fell to the back of the standings.
Red Bull increased their lead in the constructors' standings to 26 points thanks to Mercedes' mistake and Perez's victory, and Verstappen still leads the drivers' standings with four points more than Hamilton. “I don’t think a lot of things went as smoothly as in the past years,” Wolff said.
“Operationally, we were not at our highest level. We did not find the optimal working area of our car during the qualifications and the race, we did not have a fast car in the qualifications or in the race.
" "We have so much to improve that I want us to start doing it right away to make sure we can fight for the championship." “We can’t continue to lose points this way, as we did in Monaco and here. That is simply not acceptable for all of us.
" Asked if the last two races were the worst he could think of, Wolff answered in the affirmative.
Mistakes
"Yes, those are the toughest races… because we didn't have a performance in Monaco, and Valtteri, who could have finished on the podium, took 36 hours to change his tires, it's really not a great achievement compared to the standards we set for ourselves." "Then the car was nowhere in all the sessions," Wolff said of Baku.
“Then we cruised in third place and that was somewhat fine. But it is not acceptable that we failed to adjust the car properly from the start and weren't on our level when changing tires." "We are losing seconds and seconds, ”he said of the problematic tire change for Hamilton in Baku, which took 4.6 seconds.
Bottas had a disastrous weekend in which he qualified in tenth place and finished 12th in the race after being overtaken by both Alfa Romeo drivers. “I can’t remember having a weekend like this,” Bottas said in disappointment.
“Yes, there were a few weekends where we had bad sessions, but we would always have speed at some point. But this weekend we failed to figure out what the problem was." "I know where the limit is and I couldn’t go faster than this, but I was still six, seven, eight tenths behind. This is not normal and we must understand it before going to France. "