Toto Wolff has shared his one reason to hope Mercedes will be able to reel in Red Bull as soon as next season.
Neither Lewis Hamilton nor George Russell won a race in 2023. And the former has now gone more than two years without a victory since losing the 2021 title race to Max Verstappen.
In contrast, the Dutchman and his team were almost entirely dominant this year with Carlos Sainz being the only non-Red Bull racer to win a Grand Prix. So huge was their lead even by the summer break, the champions were able to switch focus to their 2024 car development much earlier than any of their rivals.
That does not bode well for any other team’s chances of closing the gap in the next 12 months. But Mercedes team principal Wolff still has a reason to believe it can be done.
“You have the laws of diminishing returns, your development or performance curve flattens – that is clear,” he told reporters. “The more mature the regulations are, the more you can extract.
“Maybe our development curve is steeper because we are behind, but that is industrial theory. Whether you can apply it to the world of sports, I’m not quite sure. It’s good engineering – [Red Bull’s] engineering team has just done a good job. They came out of the blocks, for whatever reason, much better than everybody else and they have a driver who is on top of his game.”
Wolff’s theory is that Red Bull are closer to the ceiling of what can be achieved in terms of car performance from the current set of design regulations. Mercedes, who made the wrong aerodynamic choices when the current ruleset was first introduced, have more improvements to make in that regard.
Thought the Austrian and his team have accepted that they were wrong and have returned to a more conventional approach, more experimentation seems to be on the cards. Wolff hinted as much as he spoke about the W15’s development and suggested that his designers began their work on a clean slate.
He said: “We are changing the concept. We are completely moving away from how we laid out the chassis, the weight distribution, the airflow. I mean, literally, there’s almost every component that’s being changed because only by doing that, I think we have a chance.”
But Wolff also warned: “We could get it wrong also. So, between not gaining what we expect, catching up and making a big step and competing in the front, everything is possible.”
