Today's team representatives press conference with Peter Bayer, Frederic Vasseur and Toto Wolff.
Toto, let's start with you. Not the start that Kimi Antonelli wanted in Formula 1, not the start that Mercedes wanted to this weekend. Can we get, first of all, your thoughts on his accident and perhaps start by telling us, is he OK?
Toto Wolff: Yeah, most importantly, he's OK, because the crash was 45G, so that's important. Second priority is to get the car ready for George, so the programme doesn't suffer too much, which hopefully is going to be OK. We may run a little bit late, but it's going to be OK. And the third one, yeah, it's unfortunate, because I guess having had an hour to run, we would have seen some good performances. But that's what we always said: he's a rookie, he's very young, we are prepared to invest into his future and these moments, they will happen and they will continue to happen next year. But there will also be a lot of highlights. And I think what we've seen today was.... We'd rather have a problem in slowing him down than making him faster. Because what we've seen from one and a half laps is just astonishing.
His first run was very, very quick. What was he saying to you guys when he got back to the garage after that?
TW: Well, he apologised, first of all, and I think this is what you need to do when you bring a car back that looks a little bit like a Lego box falling on the floor. But also he said that the car, he felt so much confidence, the car was good. And I guess he was just bitten. Everybody suffered from lots of temperature and especially rear temperature out of a Ascari with these kinds of speeds and that's why the rear went away stepped out.
When is Kimi's next run in the car?
TW: We haven't completely decided yet but I think Mexico.
Now given what happened here at Monza, are you tempted to bring that FP1 forward just so that he can bury this bad memory?
TW: No, I think a strong driver needs to recover from these things and cope with the pressure. And obviously this weekend wasn't easy for him because he still needs to compete in F2. You have all these shenanigans around you in Monza - Italian kid that's being hyped for the first time in a Mercedes. And that must be a heavy burden. If he wants to be a champion one day, he needs to cope with that, and I have no doubt that he can and he will.
Toto, you've yet to tell us who George Russell's team-mate is going to be next year. Will what happened today have any bearing?
TW: No, zero effect. I think most important is to hire based on ability. And an FP1 that's gone wrong is not the reason why you decide for or against the driver.
OK, just one quick question on performance. Zandvoort was difficult. How confident are you of the car's performance in low-downforce trim?
TW: I can't really say today because it's very difficult to judge the performance levels. What we've seen is very, very, very high deg, even on the ones that ran the Hard, so it's difficult at that stage to judge. I think we need a second free practice session and see how this pans out.
Toto, thank you for that. Fred, let's come to you now. Talking of performance, it looks like Ferrari has hit the ground running here at Monza. Is that your take on FP1?
Frederic Vasseur: Not really, because I think we don't have to draw any conclusion after FP1. It's like this, the last four or five events, that it's so tight that you have to avoid to do this kind of comment. But overall, it went pretty well for us. We are focused on ourselves, that we have a programme for the two days and we will stick to the programme. But so far, so good, but don't draw any conclusion for the weekend.
You've had a car on the podium at both of the last two events. Is that evidence that you're starting to find some consistency with this car?
FV: Yeah, but we were on the podium the weekend before also. And we even started from the first row, on the pole position in Spa. But I think what Toto said before is that for very small details, you can do a huge step forward or backwards on the grid or in the pace of the race, because we are all in two tenths. OK, except Lando in Zandvoort! But behind Lando, it was very, very tight. And you have to avoid to draw a conclusion on the pace overall or whatever that this can change from a weekend to another weekend or even from a session to the session. In Spa, you had Red Bull dominating FP1, McLaren FP2. We did the pole on Saturday. Mercedes won the race on Sunday. It means that we have to keep this in mind and just to be focused on your job and to avoid to conclude too quickly.
Fred, you talk about details. You're running some upgrades on the car this weekend. What are you hoping to achieve with them?
FV: To be a bit faster.
And more consistent?
FV: Yeah, consistency. More seriously, consistency was not the issue on the long stint. I think we did a huge step forward compared to 12 months ago on this. For sure, we are all looking after consistency from session to session or from event to event. But we are also in the situation that we are developing this car now for three years or four years. It's becoming more and more difficult to bring performance to the car and we have to take a bit more risk on this and sometimes it's paying off, sometimes a bit less.
How do you see the championship situation? You're 64 points behind Red Bull. Do you see that as game on?
FV: I didn't pay attention to the championship, and I won't pay attention to the championship. I think we just have to do a good job to do the best every single weekend, and if something has to come, it will come. But the worst, I think, would be to be focused on the championship, to be conservative, to do this kind of approach, because on the same weekend, for details, you can move from P1-2 to 7-8, for strategy, for tyre management, for whatever the reasons. And this can change massively from one weekend to another one. A good weekend, it's 43 points. Soon we'll have weekends with the Sprint race. It means that you can score 55 points a weekend. I think we have still something like 500 points on the table.
Alright, Fred, thank you very much. Now, Peter, coming to you, we've talked about upgrades at Ferrari. You're running some new bits on your car this weekend, I think just with Yuki. What can you tell us?
Peter Bayer: As my colleagues said, it's interesting to see that these upgrades usually work from an aerodynamic perspective, but then often they have an impact on the balance and that's why we're trying a couple of new bits on Yuki's car - floor, a small bit on the halo and also the rear view mirrors. And in the end, it's very early days and they're analysing the data now. But as Fred said, it's like taking these small steps now, because we're all operating on the top of the pyramid. And if we, especially in the midfield, if we don't get a perfect weekend together, then the other guys will obviously be right there. And Williams has done a very good job over the last couple of weeks. Alpine is there, so it's going to be a tight fight until the very end.
When you look back at Zandvoort last weekend, what were the issues with the car? Because it was a challenging one for the team.
PB: Well, it probably was not our best weekend. At the same time, Yuki was nine hundredths of Q3. Daniel had a quite good race on Sunday in terms of pace. And I said, you know, it's not one single element. It's really, you know, it's a, you know, you're starting off with the strategy. You know, one thing on the top of my head and you're having set up issues, you're having, you know, We didn't have a lot of data because we had a lot of rain, then we had Logan's crash, and so we basically, perhaps as a smaller team, were not having the tools available like these two guys have. And so we're walking into the weekend, a weekend like Zandvoort, we were a bit blind, certainly on one eye, and that makes it very challenging for us.
And while we talk about Yuki, he has a new race engineer this weekend. How were they gelling in FP1?
PB: Very good. They know each other since a while. Ernesto [Desiderio] is with us since more than a year. It's part of the overall plan that Laurent has in place to develop the team on the sporting side, on the technical side. I guess I can present it as double good news because we're developing talent internally. Ernesto will take over the race engineer for Yuki position and Mattia [Spini] is moving up internally. and so yeah happy with the development and how the team is growing. You know, we had other people joining us recently. Tim Goss will start in October, so we're making good progress on the team side.
Questions From The Floor
(Christian Menath - Motorsportmagazin.com) A question for Toto. What was the message you gave to Kimi before he jumped in the car? Did you say, 'just leave the car in one piece', or did you tell him, 'go out and show them that you can be the next Max Verstappen'?
TW: Fred said, full push! I told him to enjoy it. I think he has a lot of natural ability and the important thing is to not forget that this is the best job in the world...
FV: The best job in the world is yours.
TW: Yeah, you think? And I said to him also to take the pressure off. We live in our micro-bubble here. Nobody's interested in FP1 anyway. Whatever happens, happens. And we just get on with things. And I told him the same after the session.
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