Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMercedes

Wolff ‘never confident’ of success

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Toto Wolff says he is “never confident” Mercedes will be successful despite such a strong pre-season.

Mercedes completed the most mileage of any team in pre-season, with Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton setting the fastest two times of the final two tests in Barcelona despite only using the soft tyre compared to the supersoft for the majority of its rivals.

While long run pace was also impressive, leading to other teams saying Mercedes will starts the season as heavy favourites, Wolff told F1i the way testing has gone still doesn’t leave him feeling comfortable.

“Never confident,” Wolff said. “It’s a bit of a boring answer but we’re carefully optimistic that the programme we wanted to do, we did. Lots of mileage, we learned lots of things - not always positive - and it was a great job until now.

“We just need to get our heads down now in the next ten days and analyse properly what needs to be analysed so that we can make the car even better.”

The final day of testing as it happened

Click here for the gallery from day four of the final test

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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.