Toto Wolff praises Red Bull as Mercedes faces upgrade concerns

Mercedes has a new upgrade for it to analyse, but team principal Toto Wolff has briefly turned his focus to Red Bull who have shown incredible improvement over the last few races. The Austrian believes the gains have come from three aspects: the car, the development path, and Max Verstappen - a driver who has the ability to extract everything from what he's driving.

The Brackley outfit is yet to determine whether its recent upgrade package has delivered the performance they expected. Malaysia's track conditions meant it was difficult for the team to draw any reliable conclusions on its new components, meaning Singapore became the next test bed as the team split its drivers. Kimi Antonelli had the new package plus a new front wing, and Russell ran the old set-up.

Changes made by Red Bull for the Azerbaijan race were quite substantial. There were updates to the floor, diffuser, sidepods, mirrors and the halo to create more aerodynamic load, and the team's subsequent form has been off the back of this.

Max Verstappen took his first win of the season at the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia, and with a second consecutive grand prix win this Sunday in Singapore, Wolff has commented on whether he believes the Milton Keynes outfit is now the benchmark team.

“Really you need to take your hat off to what Red Bull has done this season," he said. "How they have developed the car and how it's all come together as a package and then you put Max Verstappen in the car and when he feels that this thing is driving like he wants it to drive then you know these are the results.

"So in by far the quickest guy today, has been the quickest guy in quali and let's see if, you know, when our upgrade hopefully starts to work and land in a place where we think it should be, whether we can be competitive against him.

"But one thing is for sure, next year it's full on the fight between the teams and Red Bull is part of that.”

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Formula 1 via Getty Images

Wolff gave his evaluation of the upgrade package after a sprint weekend of running at the hands of the championship leader.

"When we entered the weekend we made the highly earlier order to do the unusual move in a cutting edge technology business to have two different cars because we felt we need to accelerate our learning curve, and that was good. But fundamentally looking back at the race now at the end of the weekend, I think that this new car needs a very different set-up philosophy than the previous car and this is what we're learning at the moment.

"Was it an easy car today like the previous one? I don't think it was does it have the performance that we were hoping the upgrade would bring? I don't think so yet.

"But it was a step in the right direction and in Austin we should see whether we can continue to consolidate that and whether in effect it has more performance because it's crucial for the development direction for next year."

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