Wolff: 'The most painful day in my years at Mercedes'

For all its dominance and success in Formula 1, Mercedes has also endured some disappointing setbacks, but Toto Wolff says Sunday's double-DNF was his worst day at the helm of the Silver Arrows squad.

The last time the German outfit saw both its cars fail to see the checkered flag was at Barcelona in 2016 when Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg took each other out on the opening lap of the Spanish Grand Prix.

As far as Wolff was concerned, the events that unfolded at the Red Bull Ring were far more painful.

"I guess that was a major wake-up call," said Wolff.

"For me, the most painful day in my years at Mercedes, worse than Barcelona.

"I had plenty of people coming to see me before the start and saying, ‘This was going to be a walk in the park, 1-2, you have the quickest car.’

"This is exactly how motor racing can go. It can be very, very cruel and I think we had all the cruelty go against us today."

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Adding insult to its own injury after Valtteri Bottas was sidelined by a hydraulic issue on lap 14, the Mercedes camp completely fumbled its strategy call when the VSC was activated following the Finn's breakdown.

Wolff believes the team were caught by surprise by the rapid succession of events and simply overthought the process of bringing Hamilton in or not.

The fact that they chose the latter was a major blunder, albeit one ultimately void of any consequences following the Briton's retirement later in the race.

"What I think happened was we were running one and two and controlling the race, and suddenly you see your second car stopping," Wolff recalled.

"The VSC came out, we had half a lap to react, and we didn't. Fact. This is where we lost the race.

"At that stage of the race with the VSC, pitting is probably 80% the thing you need to do. With one car out there against two others, the thinking process that happened was, ‘What would happen if the others pitted [only] a car?’.

"We would come out behind Kimi, because they would leave Kimi out, and behind Max. What would that mean for the race?

"That whole thinking loop, I wouldn’t say distracted us, but we spent too much time on that."

Perhaps one meager consolation amid Mercedes' debacle is that the mechanical issues that impacted Bottas and Hamilton on Sunday were apparently unrelated to the team's recent engine upgrade.

"It's nothing to do with the reliability of the engine as far as we can see," said Wolff.

"We had a hydraulic leak that was to the steering of Valtteri and we had a drop in fuel pressure on Lewis’s car which was linked to the fuel system.

"This is our current understanding. So no regrets on introducing the engine."

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