Toto Wolff ‘angry’ but Mercedes W15 F1 car has architecture to catch Red Bull
Toto Wolff remains confident Mercedes has the baseline capable of catching Red Bull despite their poor run of results.
Toto Wolff admits he is “angry” at Mercedes’ current competitive state but believes the team’s 2024 F1 car now has the architectural baseline needed to catch Red Bull.
Mercedes have introduced upgrades at the last two races in Miami and Imola in a bid to cure their struggles to strike a balance between performance in high-speed and low-speed corners, a major weakness of the inconsistent W15.
Lewis Hamilton and George Russell took sixth and seventh in Sunday’s Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, but the lead Mercedes finished over 35 seconds adrift of Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, who claimed his fifth win in seven races.
“I think we never had such clear indications like we’ve had in the last few races where we really saw that the car was either going really fast in the high speed or in the low speed, but never both of them together,” Wolff told media including Crash.net at Imola.
“That’s something that we are able now to slowly dial out.”
Wolff conceded Mercedes’ current level of performance is simply “not good enough” but stressed the eight-time constructors’ world champions are now on the right path after two seasons of “zig-zagging”.
“I don’t know how often I used the stable platform, I think a stable platform is a car where you know which development direction to take,” he explained.
“Where you think you can be in the best performance, and that has been the zig-zagging over those last years, and there have been these false dawns absolutely.
“But I think there is a fundamental thing that we haven’t spotted when we should have, that’s why there’s more confidence at the moment.
"Having said that nothing in this sport is for granted, we are where we are, it’s not good enough. You can hear in my voice I’m angry, and just got to do a better job.”
Asked whether the W15 now has the correct aerodynamic architecture to close the gap to Red Bull, Wolff replied: “Yeah it does.
"The basis of the car is more conventional, in the sense of defining where we want to have downforce and how we want to generate aero efficiency.
“We pretty much know where this is going and this is the advantage to let’s say the two years prior.”
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