The Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has summed up the situation after the Miami Sprint Race, where Mercedes finished behind both McLaren and Ferrari. The W17 cars were unable to maintain their early-season performance advantage after rival teams introduced significant upgrades, reshaping the competitive order in Formula 1. Another poor start from Kimi Antonelli also stood out, but Wolff took responsibility on behalf of the team.
After five weeks of development break, at least over the short Sprint distance, the performance hierarchy on track has clearly changed, and not by a small margin.
The Miami Sprint, held in the late afternoon European time, confirmed that Mercedes is no longer the technical and performance reference in Formula 1, at least at the Florida circuit.
McLaren, which secured a dominant one-two finish with Lando Norris ahead of Oscar Piastri, and Ferrari with Charles Leclerc, both proved faster than the W17 cars. The two Mercedes drivers were instead left fighting each other for fourth position, with no realistic pace advantage to challenge those ahead.
This represents a clear and, in some ways, surprising reversal of form. In the first three races of the season, Mercedes had looked so dominant that closing the gap in just over a month appeared almost impossible.
Instead, the large number of upgrades brought by McLaren and Ferrari, combined with the lack of new developments on the Mercedes W17, created a very different competitive picture than expected.
At the end of the Miami Sprint Race, Toto Wolff delivered a clear assessment: Mercedes arrived in Miami behind on upgrades, and the team believed the advantage built in the first three races would be enough to stay ahead, but that has not been the case.
“We know we are a bit behind with upgrades compared to the other teams,” the Austrian manager said.
“We were hoping to maintain our advantage and, in terms of lap time, in the Sprint we were close to the pace of the leaders.” In reality, George Russell, the leading Mercedes driver at the finish (Kimi Antonelli received a five-second penalty for track limits), had to accept a gap of 13 seconds to Lando Norris. A significant margin for a race lasting only 19 laps.
Wolff also took responsibility for Kimi Antonelli’s poor start, which has become a recurring issue this season, and insisted that the fault lies with the team rather than the driver.
The exact cause of Antonelli’s launch issue was not fully clarified, but according to Wolff it should be attributed to a team-side problem.
“But if you start badly, which was not at all Kimi’s fault but a problem on our side, it becomes difficult to recover. This season will be a real development race and whoever gains a few tenths over their rivals will benefit,” Wolff explained.
After the Sprint, Antonelli confirmed Wolff’s comments regarding his start. The procedure itself was executed correctly, but the Italian rookie may have been affected by grip levels.
“I mean, from a procedural point of view, for once I did everything right, so it was just… yes, we probably targeted a grip level that was a bit too optimistic, considering that, as you know, grip was much lower than we expected,” Antonelli said.
“Yesterday we couldn’t start FP1 properly because of the issue we had, so we couldn’t really evaluate the grip on the grid, and yes, obviously it was a shame. I was very frustrated afterwards and I made a lot of mistakes,” he added.
Leave a Reply