"I don't know" - Toto Wolff unsure about reason behind growing performance gap between Lewis Hamilton and George Russell

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff seems mystified, just like everyone else, about the growing gap between Lewis Hamilton and George Russell this season.

The 2022 F1 season saw both drivers being very competitive against each other. This season, however, there's been a slight shift.

Since the upgrade in Monaco where Mercedes moved to a more conventional car concept, Hamilton has slowly begun pulling away from Russell in terms of performance. The latter has found it hard to keep up, which can be seen in their qualifying as well as race head-to-head statistics.

While many pundits have simply put it down to Lewis Hamilton coming into his own with the new car, some are confused by the extent of struggle George Russell has faced.

The same question was posed to Mercedes boss Toto Wolff, who admitted he had no clue about why this is happening. He indicated, though, that a lack of confidence in the car could be a factor.

As quoted by PlanetF1, he said:

“I don’t know. These cars are on the knife’s edge. You can quickly fall off it and lose the confidence.

“On the other side, if you’re within that corridor of sweet spot… Having said that, that car has no sweet spot! But being more in that zone of understanding what it will do next, I think there’s a big difference and you can quickly be in either one of these situations, and obviously it goes against you.”

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Lewis Hamilton's teammate George Russell reflects on another average weekend in Spa before summer break

Lewis Hamilton's teammate George Russell spoke about his performance in Spa after enduring a disappointing weekend. Russell was once again not even close to the level of performance that his teammate was able to put together, finishing in sixth place on raceday.

The Mercedes driver said:

“I think this weekend validated probably the direction we’ve taken the setup in recent races hasn’t been the right one. We suffered with a huge amount of bouncing today. A number of teams did, maybe not as severe as we did. Still obviously a bit of a shame to see that as a sport.

“At the pinnacle, the majority of teams are still struggling with bouncing. I hope something can be solved in that regard in the future.”

Lewis Hamilton's surge is clear now that a few races have been completed since the Monaco upgrade, while George Russell is struggling to do the same. It will be interesting to see how the dynamic between the two plays out in the second half of the season.