Toto Wolff knows there is still much work to be done for Mercedes to compete at the level they are used to despite some strong results in recent races.
The Silver Arrows cannot compete with Red Bull and Ferrari for pace this year, but have generally been there to take full advantage when one of the front runners slips up. They showed that from the off in Bahrain, when Lewis Hamilton and George Russell finished third and fourth as Red Bull suffered a double DNF.
More recently, Russell was on the podium in Spain and Azerbaijan – strong results in maintaining his record of top-five finishes in every race so far this year. Hamilton, meanwhile, drove through his back pain to fourth in Baku before adding another podium to his collection last time out in Canada.
While those were all reasons for Wolff to be cheerful, he has warned his drivers and Mercedes fans to not get ahead of themselves. "One swallow doesn’t make a summer," he said. "We saw that swallow in Barcelona but somehow it flew somewhere else. So, I think we need to be careful.
"We were off the pace on Friday, in the wet we were good [on Saturday], I think it was respectable. And I think [on Sunday] at times we were with the quickest cars. In the second stint, Lewis and George were almost matching the front-runners – not quite, but on some laps – so that was very encouraging to see, but we need to be careful. There's so much work we need to do to be back at the front and we aren't there yet."
Up next for the drivers is their home race, the British Grand Prix, where Mercedes and Hamilton in particular have enjoyed a lot of success. The Silver Arrows have won every race there bar one since 2013, though that is not likely to be a record which gets any better this season given the performance gulf that still exists to the top two.
With that in mind, Wolff's cautious outlook continued when looking ahead to the race weekend. "Silverstone was good to us in the past and the circuit is smoother than the last three ones, but it's not Barcelona," he added. "So now we should manage our own expectations and really grind away, look at the data and come up with some sensible solutions, not just for Silverstone but going forward."
