"You’ve got to stand up and take it"- Mercedes boss urged to take blame for car instead of criticising others

Eddie Jordan reckons Mercedes boss Toto Wolff needs to own up to the shortcomings of the team instead of lambasting it.

The Austrian was not happy with the start of the season in Bahrain, and his brutally honest assessment was targeted at the design unit of the team. At the time, Jordan had termed the Mercedes boss' comments as 'crass'.

Revisiting the same on the Formula For Success podcast, Jordan feels that just like when a leader gets the credit for their team's success, they should also own up to the shortcomingsm too. Talking about his comments where he termed Wolff's attack on Mercedes engineers 'crass', Jordan said:

“I love teasing Toto. What is it about me and Toto? I love it because he just takes it, and he should tell me to get stuffed sometimes! But I’d still do it though, nevertheless. I think Toto is a really good addition to Formula 1. I think he has massive attributes. But I’ve been critical, and just to answer indirectly the question, I’ve been critical in the last couple of episodes of this (podcast) where he was critical of his designers and his engineers."

He added:

And I’d say, ‘Well, hang on a second’, when I was the boss of Jordan, if the car was good, I took all the claim. And of course, if the car was bad, you tried to put it on somebody else! But actually, you’ve got to stand up and take it.

"You’ve got to be a man, it happened under his watch. He’s the chief executive of the team. My message to Toto was that I would much prefer if he stood up and said ‘look, we have Mercedes are a team, will always be a team, and we got this wrong’.”

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Mercedes have shown impressive recovery

Since the first race of the season when Toto Wolff criticised the team, there has been an impressive surge in Mercedes' performance. The German team has done a good job of putting together impressive numbers, securing their irst podium in Australia with Lewis Hamilton.

Moreover, there was an impressive front-row start for George Russell in the same race. The young driver led the charge before things went downhill. Wolff has been an impressive leader, to say the least, and that has trickled down in the way Mercedes have carried themselves as a top F1 team.