Mercedes still needs “a lot of lap time” to fight for F1 wins

Lewis Hamilton and George Russell helped Mercedes to its best result of the season so far as they finished second and third behind championship leader Max Verstappen in the French Grand Prix.

But although Hamilton came home just 10 seconds adrift of the winning Red Bull after the 53-lap race, Mercedes said it remained realistic about just how big the deficit was to the front.

With Verstappen having been managing his tyres and not under much pressure from behind, Mercedes thinks that France did not offer a proper picture of how far off it is.

Asked by Autosport if he felt the reality remained that Mercedes was around 0.4-0.5 seconds behind the top squads, team principal Toto Wolff said: “I think he [Hamilton] was able to stabilise the gap at five or six seconds in the first stint, but you need to be honest and say when they were racing each other in the second stint, probably Max was just keeping it on the track.

“So in my half empty glass perspective, there is still a lot of lap time to catch up.”

Mercedes had a confusing weekend in France as, on a weekend which it had headed to hoping to fight for the win, it was left further off the front in qualifying than it had been at recent races.

Wolff reckoned the key to the issue now was the team getting to the bottom of why its French performance did not match expectations.

“I think with every lap, we collect more data and understand a little bit, so we’re putting the little pieces of the puzzle together,” he said. “It’s a process that’s sometimes difficult.”

What he was clear about, however, is that France showed the Mercedes W13 is not good on single lap qualifying pace and it remains troublesome in terms of tyre warm-up.

“It’s simply not one thing: we’re lacking performance on a single lap and we are lacking performance at the initial stages of the stint,” he said.

“There is something to understand and it’s not a silver bullet but it’s a few topics that they roll in to our performance. Second and third is a good result but we work tirelessly to win and there is still a gap.”