Wolff cautions against Mercedes “exuberance” after strong F1 qualifying

George Russell and Lewis Hamilton will start second and third in Melbourne, helped by a disastrous qualifying session for Red Bull’s Sergio Perez that left the Mexican in 20th and last place on the grid.

The performance represents a clear step forward after the first two races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, which led the team to investigate a change of car concept.

Wolff stressed that despite finding some extra speed from the W14 this weekend, the team should not lose sight of the bigger picture and should continue to push on with the planned change in order to achieve longer-term gains.

“I think we need to be careful not to oscillate between mania and depression, but keep the thinking rational,” said Wolff.

“And what we’ve seen today is that there’s a lot of potential unlocking within the car, that’s clear, but we need to take the right decisions for the long term.

“And in that respect, we will continue to race the best possible package that we have. And whether that has a narrow body or wide body is irrelevant. We just need to have more downforce in the sweet spot of the car.”

Pressed on whether or not he stood by the plan to switch concepts, he warned that the next race could go easily the other way.

“This is exactly the swings that we must avoid,” he said. “Because obviously you’re delivering such a good qualifying today and it swings into exuberance, and we’re like okay everything we’ve thought was the wrong thing, let’s continue to develop the car and then when the next bad result you think it the other way around.

“So we have never had any dogma on what the car needs to look like. We know exactly where we got it wrong.

“We also know there’s some goodness in the car, especially if we put every step over a weekend right and we are able to extract what’s in the car, you can see that.”

Nevertheless, Wolff conceded that the Melbourne performance – which saw the team outpace Aston Martin and Ferrari – came as a welcome surprise.

“I could play it coolly and say well, that is all like we expected it,” he said. “But it’s not. I think what you need to love in this sport is that with all the lows you have, you also have some highs.

“And obviously it’s not where we want to be. We want to challenge all the way to the front, but finishing P2/P3 was definitely much more than we expected coming into this weekend.”

Wolff was keen to praise his…