‘Not good enough’… The moment Toto Wolff felt ‘embarrassment’ as the team principal of Mercedes

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The 2023 Formula 1 season didn’t go to plan for Mercedes and team principal Toto Wolff.

After winning the Constructors’ Championship in 2021 but cruelly missing out on helping Lewis Hamilton win his 8th title in Abu Dhabi, Mercedes set about tackling the next era of regulations in F1.

Unfortunately, Red Bull were the dominant force in 2022 and Mercedes fell to 3rd in the standings after being leapfrogged by Ferrari.

Toto Wolff wanted a reaction from his Mercedes team in 2023, but what followed was a disaster for the Anglo-German team.

They watched on as Red Bull reaffirmed their position at the top of the standings, winning 21 out of 22 races.

Hamilton and George Russell didn’t have the machinery to compete and while they managed to help Mercedes overtake Ferrari in the standings, they were more than 450 points behind Red Bull.

Author Matt Whyman followed the Brackley-based team for his book Inside Mercedes F1 and shared what happened in the briefing after pre-season testing in Bahrain.

He shared what Wolff told the team ahead of the campaign and the ‘embarrassment’ he felt when comparing Mercedes’s performance to their rivals.

Toto Wolff felt ‘embarrassment’ after Mercedes pre-season testing in 2023

After pre-season testing, Mercedes are debriefing ahead of the season’s opening race.

Hamilton’s race engineer Pete Bonnington said: “It wasn’t long ago that we were kings of winter testing, It feels like we’ve slipped.”

Going through the feedback from that testing session where Mercedes were behind both Red Bull and Ferrari, Andrew Shovlin trackside engineer director asked: “Are we, as leaders, holding standards high enough?”

READ MORE: Toto Wolff pinpoints the biggest thing he’s learned from Lewis Hamilton in his 12 years at Mercedes

Wolff injected and said: “This is just not good enough.

“We need to feel a certain degree of embarrassment here. We blame the problem not the person, but nevertheless…come on!”

Wolff was also keen to point out that Mercedes were being beaten by a customer team – Aston Martin – at the time, something that is still true today with McLaren in pole position to win the Constructors’ Championship.

Mercedes still struggling with problems that they faced during 2023 F1 season

Unfortunately for Wolff, Mercedes only achieved one podium finish in the first six races of 2023, but things began to improve after the Spanish Grand Prix.

The team’s consistency earned them 2nd in the championship last year, with both drivers struggling to secure top-three finishes, with Ferrari’s poor strategy calls ultimately making the difference.

The 2024 campaign was supposed to be the time when Mercedes returned to the front of the grid alongside Red Bull.

READ MORE: Everything you need to know about Mercedes AMG F1 Team from team principal to lineage

And while the Anglo-Austrian team have fallen backwards, it’s customer team McLaren that have taken up the mantle alongside Ferrari.

Hamilton is still working hard behind the scenes at Mercedes ahead of his final three races with the team before he joins Ferrari in 2025.

It means it will be up to Russell and new driver Kimi Antonelli to see out the final season of the current regulations before the grid is reset and Wolff will hope the team are in a much stronger position by then.