Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff believes the team’s reliability is “just not good enough”, as Kimi Antonelli lost a podium in the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix after a late retirement.<\/p>\n
Antonelli<\/a> looked set to finish second in Sunday’s 66-lap race<\/a> having got the better of Mercedes<\/a> team mate George Russell<\/a> into Turn 1 with just five laps remaining.<\/p>\n But on the next lap, the Italian teenager came to a halt after a mechanical issue with his W17 meant he suffered his first retirement of the season.<\/p>\n Under the new-for-2026 regulations, reliability has become a hot topic with Mercedes power units in both the factory team and customer outfits having suffered problems.<\/p>\n Russell retired from the lead in Canada, while reigning World Champion Lando Norris was also forced out in Monaco due to a power unit problem.<\/p>\n “We just can’t compete for a championship if every second race a car is losing fat points. It’s one and then the other and to finish first, first you have to finish. That’s just not good enough,” said Wolff to Sky Sports F1.<\/p>\n Prior to Antonelli’s retirement, both Mercedes were set to finish behind race winner Lewis Hamilton, the seven-time World Champion securing his first Grand Prix win for Ferrari after utilising a three-stop strategy compared to two employed by many.<\/p>\n Wolff believes that intra-team fighting during the middle phase of the race, with Antonelli pressuring Russell, may have cost them victory as Hamilton was able to rejoin in the lead after making his final pit stop under a Virtual Safety Car.<\/p>\n “We tried to race fair in the team game but maybe it cost us the win today, and that’s something we need to discuss with the drivers, how are we doing it if we’re fighting somebody else for a race win,” added Wolff.<\/p>\n “They raced each other quite hard before George’s stop and I think we lost four, five, six seconds to Lewis, and then obviously with the VSC, it changed the order.<\/p>\n “George and Kimi racing hard [means] we’re leaving lap time on the track and we need to discuss with them for the future.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff believes the team’s reliability is “just not good enough”, as Kimi Antonelli lost…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":492744,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105],"class_list":["post-492743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/492744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}