‘A man who’s frustrated’ - Observation made about Toto Wolff amid Mercedes woe

Karun Chandhok believes Mercedes F1 boss Toto Wolff is behaving and talking like a man “who’s frustrated”.

For the third year in a row, Mercedes are enduring a disappointing start to an F1 season, with their 2024 challenger’s performance proving to be vastly underwhelming across the opening four rounds.

Despite overhauling their design concept with the W15, Mercedes still appear to be no closer to mastering the understanding of the latest ground-effect regulations that were introduced in 2022.

Wolff has admitted that the team’s wind tunnel data is not correlating to on-track performance and said the W15 is exhibiting characteristics that “make no sense”.

"I think he's a man who's frustrated,” Chandhok said on the Sky Sports F1 podcast.

“The best Mercedes was 45 seconds off the win but if we take the Red Bulls out of it, they were still 25 seconds behind the best non-Red Bull, which is a huge amount in a Grand Prix.

“Toto made an interesting comment to Ted [Kravitz] after the race, where he said the first stint was terrible and after that, it was not so bad.

"I looked back at some of the numbers and it's little bit better, but in the first stint, they lost 11 seconds to Sainz in 15 laps, which is three-quarters of a second nearly. After that, they still lost on average about 0.6 per lap. So it was a little bit better, but not a lot better.

“So I think they were the comments of a frustrated man, who has come off a tremendous run of success and is again staring at another season, of the team that he co-owns, unlikely to win the World Championship.

"That's not the standards that he's used to or expects, I think, from the team.”

Martin Brundle has described Mercedes’ correlation problems as “very worrying”.

“Toto wears his heart on his sleeve doesn’t he, especially when we catch him just after yet another disappointment in the Mercedes team,” he added of Wolff.

“He tends to blurt it out, in terms of what he thinks about his own team and other teams.”