Wolff plays down Ferrari's Spa pace

Toto Wolff insists he is not concerned by Ferrari's race pace at the Belgian Grand Prix despite coming under pressure at a track expected to suit Mercedes.

Following Ferrari's one-two at the Hungaroring – a high downforce circuit with short straights – Spa-Francorchamps was expected to suit Mercedes more, especially as the team introduced a power unit upgrade. While Lewis Hamilton took pole position, Sebastian Vettel was a quarter of a second adrift in qualifying and then shadowed Hamilton for the full race but had to settle for second place.

With Hamilton holding on for victory, Wolff maintains he had not been assuming Mercedes would have the upper hand at Spa.

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"I think first of all it's difficult to attribute patterns of circuits to specific cars," Wolff said. "We've seen this year, you think you're good and then you're not as good. What we've seen is that we weren't great on the high-downforce, slow races such as Hungary and Monaco. We need to improve that for Singapore.

"It's a tough fight with Ferrari. Everyone is extracting the maximum to win this development race. We need to bring performance to the car every race in order to get our nose in front. In so far, not surprised."

Hamilton himself attributes his victory to being out in front, claiming Vettel was quicker than him over a race distance but unable to overtake.

"It was a win from getting position in qualifying," Hamilton said. "I mean, if I wasn't in the lead I wouldn't have won – the Ferrari was quicker, so it definitely wasn't race pace."

The one time Vettel attacked was at the Safety Car restart, using ultrasoft tires to challenge Hamilton who was on softs. With Hamilton holding on, the race leader says it took some clever tactics to prevent Vettel from overtaking.

"Initially I got a very good start on the back straight and got a really good pull away and was able to catch him out, as I did in Baku on the restarts with the Safety Car. I broke away but I didn't have the right power mode, so I pulled away initially but then he started catching me up as we went into the last corner.

"Initially that felt like it was a mistake, but in actual fact it was a really good thing because if I'd gone into the last corner with that gap and come out of Turn 1 with that gap, he would have had the momentum, being three or four car lengths behind, to really propel and really be able to get a good tow and come past me. So it worked out perfectly.

"Going into Turn 1 I had very cold tires, so I had a small lock-up and he was on the gas before me and I could see him, and then as we were going down that straight [towards Eau Rouge] I didn't keep it fully lit the whole way, I just gave it 90 percent throttle just to keep him as close as possible.

"I knew he wasn't going to come by because he knows I would overtake him at the top part [on the Kemmel Straight] with the tow, so as we were going up Eau Rouge that's when I gave it maximum power to get the top and he had no space to really propel himself, so he just pulled out to the side. It was a cool battle, but it was really great to go into Turn 5 having done just enough to stay ahead. I was really happy with that.

"After that it was nine or 10 laps of qualifying – just heavy, fast laps to try to continue with that gap. He was very quick, he had the better tires, so I had to pull out some very good laps to stay ahead of him because he was very, very quick in that second phase."