F1 | Mercedes, Wolff: “Bottas in crisis? The grid is crowded, welcome to the new world”

The lackluster comeback of Valtteri Bottas, According to Toto wolff, is due to an upward leveling of the mid-table teams. The Finnish driver, who started from 15th place in Melbourne after the accident in qualifying and the penalty for replacing the gearbox, in fact only managed to overtake Ocon, Stroll and Vandoorne on the track: the Safety Car and the retirements of others then caused the rest. To be fair, it must be said that the 8th place finish is also the result of the objective difficulty in overtaking on the Albert Park circuit.

The Mercedes team principal, rather than scolding Bottas, underlined the competitiveness of this World Championship: “I think this is the reality now. He has outpaced more people than anyone else: Stroll, Ocon and Vandoorne, three overtakings, and then he was lucky with the Safety Car” – explained Wolff at Autosport. “His timing was spot on and he couldn't have been in the top ten without that. I think the whole grid is a lot more crowded and there is no situation in which one car manages to overtake everyone as we saw before. Welcome to the new world”.

Se Nico Hulkenberg in recent days he had complained about an even wider gap compared to the top teams, Wolff, on the contrary, believes that Mercedes, Ferrari e Red Bull are not so clearly superior to the competition: “I expect these three teams to be able to win races and fight for the championship. Then behind it is the group with McLaren, Renault e Haas, they're right up there. For Max (Verstappen, ed.) and it wasn't possible for Valtteri to overtake these cars".

Federico Martino