Wolff: "Mercedes won title by making fewer mistakes"

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Mercedes principal Toto Wolff says that his team won the 2019 driver and constructor championships by making fewer mistakes than their rivals during the year.

He added that this had made up for not having the dominant or even the vest car on the grid this year, making it a particularly difficult and fraught campaign.

"Every championship seems like the hardest," he said this week. "It may be because we are protected by our memory, but certainly this year had its up and downs.

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"We came out of the block very strong, didn't have the quickest package on Saturday for a long time," Motorsport.com quotes Wolff as explaining.

"But we able to make the least mistakes on Sunday," he added. "That was probably the biggest key to making us win the championship."

Since the summer break, the team had struggled to keep up with a resurgent Ferrari. Wolff said that this is what made a Silver Arrows 1-2-in the United States Grand Prix so satisfying to all at the team's Brackley and Brixworth facilities.

"For me the highlight is Austin," he acknowledged. "We came back to old form, winning the title decider with Valtteri, and winning the championship with Lewis with strong pace."

And Wolff insisted that the squad had been energised rather than troubled by the increased level of competition from Ferrari and Red Bull in 2019.

"We like the fight a lot," he said. "You can see, [we] celebrate the races that are really tough and are able to win.

"Everybody wants to see a fight out there," he stated. "This is what keeps us going.

"When we don't qualify on pole but we are able to win the race on Sunday I get 10 times the amount of [messages] than I get if we're on pole.

"So we need these guys strong, competitive, playing with the same rules, and then it's what we love doing."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.