Toto Wolff admits Mercedes design ‘doesn’t work’ after Lewis Hamilton nightmare

Mercedes chief Toto Wolff has conceded that the car's design 'doesn't work' following another weekend to forget for seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton.

The Brit finished outside the points for the first time this season and suffered the humiliation of being lapped by Max Verstappen, the man he was going toe-to-toe with for the title throughout last season.

It's left Hamilton's chances of winning a record-breaking eighth world title this season slim at best, with the veteran driver conceding even before the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix that he was 'obviously' not vying for the honour.

Wolff already conceded to Hamilton after the race that the Mercedes car was 'undriveable' and has now gone further, admitting that the German manufacturer's design 'doesn't work' having encountered another weekend to forget.

"All of the goodness and badness happens mainly on the floor and we have interesting ideas and concepts that we are exploring that have to find their way onto the car in the next few races. I wouldn’t say there is such thing as a concept being wrong. But is there a part of what we have done that simply doesn’t work with the regulations, and what is it?

“You don’t need to throw away the goodness, but if there are fundamental areas that don’t allow us to unlock the potential that we believe is in the car, then you need to cut your losses.”

However, Wolff is not prepared to scrap the concept completely with just four races on the board – particularly as it's still not clear where exactly the problem for their lack of pace lies.

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“It would mean you say, ‘Where is the baseline now?' Is there a new one we can start on where we believe we can unlock more potential? (But) if we thought that, we would have done it five months ago. We believed this was the development line we needed to take. So it is quite a tricky exercise.

“You can only cut the losses into next year if you understand where we got it wrong, because at the moment we simply don’t. Not yet.

“We have a direction to unlock the potential in the car to bring us much closer but at the moment we haven’t got the key. So we just need to grind away and rely on the science and physics before spiralling into some kind of negative momentum, which we are not.”

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