Despite only the first of 23 qualifying sessions this year, the size of the disparity suggests the team has regressed in comparison to its key competitors over the winter. Mercedes has pursued a distinct car idea since the introduction of new technical regulations last year, including recognisable thin sidepods that no other team on the grid has imitated.
Wolff acknowledges that in order for the squad to continually pursue victories over the long term, a change will be required after defending the idea throughout 2022 and choosing to continue with it at the start of this season.
I don’t think this bundle will ultimately be competitive, he declared. We tried our hardest during the winter, but now we need to regroup, get down with the engineers, who are utterly not fanatical about anything u2014 there are no holy cows u2014 and decide what is the development direction that we want to take in order to be competitive to win races. I am confident that we can win races this season, but it is the mid- and long-term that we need to look at and which decisions we need to make. It is not like last year when you scored many podiums and eventually you get there.
Later in the season, Mercedes expects to make significant changes to its bodywork, but Wolff indicated that wouldn’t likely be enough to close the championship gap this year.
I haven’t seen any silver bullets previously, he continued, adding, I don’t know what is going to happen this year. We may find a silver bullet next week and unlock five-tenths in the car. You never know, but in the mid- and long-term, what we really need is a car that will force us to compete for an eighth championship.
Source: Mercedes – AMG
According to GPS data, the new Mercedes can keep up with the fastest vehicles in low-speed turns but suffers in high-speed turns. Wolff claimed that although the team exceeded its own performance goals over the winter, it still lagged behind competitors, which led to his conviction that the car idea needed to alter.
As a result, he stated, I have obligations and I’d need to fire myself if I wanted to do something [to react]; with this team, we blame the problem and not the person. We therefore possess all the necessary components for success, including the personnel and facility that have won eight consecutive championships.
We made a mistake the previous year and tried to correct it by continuing to use this idea of a car, but it didn’t work. Those data points from this past weekend are crucial because we need to shift our attention to what we think might be the proper directionu2014what we are missing. We can see on the GPS where we perform well and where we don’t, so we just need to figure out what that is. Whether it involves installing larger sidepods on the car or more subtly enhancing performance is another matter. We will undoubtedly go untrodden paths as a group.
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