Wolff reveals reasons behind Mercedes’ ‘dominant’ 1-3 in Montreal but admits he’s ‘never confident’ for upcoming races

Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff has given his view on his squad’s “dominant” win in the Canadian Grand Prix – revealing the factors that led to Mercedes overshadowing the opposition in Montreal.

George Russell smoothly converted pole position into his fourth career win around the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve, resisting pressure from Max Verstappen – as well as a post-race protest from Red Bull – to claim Mercedes’ first win of the campaign.

Asked if there was an explanation as to Mercedes’ dominance around a track where the expected cooler conditions – known to favour Mercedes – had failed to materialise, Wolff joked: “I thought it’s when I’m wearing a pullover, there’s some kind of correlation with our performances because that means it’s cold! And today, 50 degrees track temperature, and we’ve been dominant.

“We’ve had some things changing on the car, we have a new rear suspension. I’m really happy how the team has managed that, the trackside team and also back in the factory, how these things have been coming onto the car. But I guess you need to look at the track layout.

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“Montreal was always good to us; it lacks the typical high-speed corners where we suffer more in the heat. That’s one, and number two is it’s quite a smooth asphalt here, which is less abrasive and therefore less damaging to our car that suffers from rear tyre degradation and overheating.”

Pushed on the rear suspension changes on the Mercedes W16s that allowed Russell to win in Canada and team mate Kimi Antonelli to become F1’s third-youngest podium finisher, Wolff admitted that the changes – first introduced at Imola – hadn’t been a “magic solution” that had transformed them into the dominant team in the field.

“I think we brought the new rear geometry for that particular problem that we had, the rear [tyre] surface overheating, and we weren’t quite sure about the results in Imola, because they were worse than we expected, and then taking it off I think was the right thing to do – and bringing it on here, because hopefully the development direction is correct.

“In these kind of regulations, you never know whether you land development or whether you don’t; correlation has been difficult, particularly for us, but for many other teams, and putting it on here is… I think there are other factors at play here.

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“The track layout is just different, the asphalt is different, and there is never one magic solution that makes the car go from a, let’s say, best-case podium car to a dominant winner.

“But the more data sets we have, the more we learn.”

Asked, meanwhile, if the win had made him confident of repeating the performance at upcoming races, Wolff replied: “I’m never confident, because the swings in performance are still there.

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“We’ve seen it last year that on some tracks, it wasn’t even close to who was second, but we dominated throughout the weekend, and that’s a little bit the pattern we have seen here. Austria is going to be a different ballgame, different track layout, different challenges, so all of our eyes and brains are concentrated on Austria now. This is done, tick the box.”

Mercedes’ 40 points in Montreal saw them leapfrog Ferrari to reclaim P2 in the Constructors’ standings, albeit they sit a full 175 points behind leaders McLaren, despite Lando Norris failing to score in Canada after a dramatic crash with his team mate Oscar Piastri.