Toto Wolff admits Mercedes not yet able to fight for wins everywhere

Toto Wolff does not believe Mercedes are in a position to fight for victory at every F1 grand prix despite their recent resurgence.

Mercedes emerge from the summer break as F1’s in-form team, having won three of the last four races in Austria, Great Britain and Belgium, with Lewis Hamilton claiming two of them.

Although Mercedes continue to gain on their rivals, team principal Wolff is not convinced they have a car capable of competing for wins at every type of circuit.

“Ahead of the summer break, we built momentum with an improved car and stronger results. We will look to continue that progress into the final 10 races of the season,” Wolff said ahead of this weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort.

“We know we have ground to make up. We are not yet able to compete for victories at every Grand Prix.

“We have made good steps in improving the W15's weaknesses though and will continue to work hard to take more. If we can do so, then we will close the gap to those ahead in both championships.”

Speaking to select media including Crash.net last time out at the Belgian Grand Prix, Mercedes’ head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin shed some light on the W15’s “main remaining weaknesses”.

“In hot conditions at rear-limited circuits we’re not as good as the McLarens, or Max [Verstappen’s Red Bull],” Shovlin said in response to a question from Crash.net.

“We saw that in Budapest, we saw that in Austria. Our gap on racepace in Budapest was smaller. So I think we've made we've made progress there over the sequence of these recent races. If you looked at Silverstone though, we were competitive.

“I think the main weaknesses is that, but then everyone's trying to develop their cars. If you're not developing at a faster rate than the others, then you will quite quickly slip backwards.

“So there's always there's always going to be a focus just on how much development you can bring. And we can only see, you know, a month or six weeks into the future, because that's the that's the sort of horizon that you're working with in your wind tunnel.

“What we don't know is will we be able to keep delivering performance from the wind tunnel, from our vehicle dynamics group and mechanical design group.

“They're going to continue to be able to bring performance into the last part of the year - hopefully. We've got good ideas, but there's a lot of work to go through between having an idea and actually having physical parts that you can put on the car and make it go quicker.”