Mercedes ‘mustn’t get carried away’ with early F1 lead - Wolff

Mercedes Formula 1 boss Toto Wolff insists his team cannot afford to become complacent amid a dominant start to the 2020 season.

After picking up the first three victories on offer this year with relative ease, Mercedes has already been tipped as being potential runaway winners en route to a seventh straight world championship double.

Lewis Hamilton leads teammate Valtteri Bottas by five points in the drivers’ standings, with the closest non-Mercedes driver, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, already 30 points adrift. Meanwhile, in the constructors’ championship, the German manufacturer holds a whopping 66-point advantage over Red Bull.

And Mercedes is expected to be the team to beat once again at the upcoming triple-header, which begins with back-to-back races at Silverstone, before F1 travels to Barcelona for the Spanish Grand Prix.

“I'm not sure I'm seeing the competition fall apart,” Wolff stressed following Mercedes’ latest victory at the Styrian Grand Prix.

“You can see that Red Bull was struggling all through the weekend and then they had a pretty decent race car, a car that didn't look like it could start and the mechanics did a really awesome job on the car there.

“The gaps are nothing. If you look at the driver points’ standing, it's 30 points that after three races we have with Lewis to Max. So you have one DNF and all the gap is gone, so we just need to keep going.

“We mustn't be carried away with thinking we are the greatest, because then you start quickly losing.”

With the 2020 calendar still yet to be finalised and considering the unprecedented nature of the current campaign, Wolff was keen to stress that it is far too early into the season to start getting comfortable.

“I think it's important to pick up every point and I've always said that every session needs to be optimised, and every race weekend needs to be optimised to collect points,” he explained.

“And in a way, the achievement of the team scoring three victories out of three races is something we can be proud of.

“We have solved the problems that we had in Spielberg 1, and we need to be happy with how it panned out so far. But the gaps are never big enough in order to get comfortable and we need to continue to work.

“There's another three races that will be very important and hopefully good ones for us, but I'm relieved once it's done – and we haven’t even done 20% of the championship yet, so we have to continue to push.”