Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has accepted that a radical rethink of their car’s design is going to be required if the team is to compete at the front of the grid once again.
Having sat in the hotseat at Mercedes since 2013, Wolff has skin in the game, personally owning 30% of Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix, and has helped the team achieve record-breaking success.
With the introduction of a new string of technical regulations in 2022 brining about the end of the ‘Hybrid Era’, Mercedes has struggled to adapt and keep pace with their Red Bull rivals.
Last season, porpoising problems with the W13 made the car, at points, almost undriveable, particularly on circuits like Baku.
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The design flaws were so severe that there were fears Lewis Hamilton might need to miss a race having suffered such a painful experience in the driving seat.
While Mercedes has now gotten on top of this, there is still a substantial performance gap between the Silver Arrows and Red Bull, with the W14 over 50 seconds behind in Bahrain and more than 30 seconds off the leader’s pace in Jeddah.
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“I don’t think that this package is going to be competitive eventually,” Wolff conceded.
“We gave it our best go last year, also over the winter, and now we all just need to regroup, sit down with the engineers, be totally non-dogmatic, ask what is the development direction we want to pursue in order to be able to win races.
“I’m sure we can win races this season but it’s really the medium and long-term that we need to look at,” he continued.
“The people in charge in Mercedes and in INEOS, they are high-performance individuals within the core business or in sports. We have all been through downs and ups and there is not a millimetre of doubt. There is so much support from them in order to get us back on track,” Wolff added.