Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff says his team cannot give up on closing the gap to Red Bull this season and won’t allow Mercedes to lose sight of overall progress based on a tough race in Austria.
Mercedes heads to this weekend’s British Grand Prix off the back of a disappointing result at the Red Bull Ring, finishing seventh and eighth behind Red Bull, Ferrari, one McLaren and one Aston Martin. Despite Max Verstappen still having an advantage of more than 20 seconds over his nearest challenger prior to a late pit stop, Wolff says settling for where Mercedes currently stands and focusing solely on 2024 is not an option.
“No, I maintain the belief because if I were to say I don’t maintain the belief, then we might as well turn it off, put everything into next year’s car, be happy to finish in the top 10 — but you can’t,” Wolff said. “You just have to continue working, take those bad days as well as possible and try to rebound and come closer.
“We’ve seen races where we were decent — how much was our gap to Verstappen in Montreal? Ten seconds? That’s much more encouraging than what it was (last Sunday).
“I’m not worried at all because I believe in the quality of the team. As long as the trend is going upwards. Like a share price — there will be setbacks, it’s never a straight line up, it zig-zags.
“This is one of the bigger downwards adjustments and you don’t want to have that, but the only ones who are getting it right are Max and Red Bull. Everybody else needs to question themselves pretty much every second weekend, why the performance is there and why it goes again.”
[lawrence-auto-related count=3 category=1388]
Mercedes will have further updates at Silverstone but Wolff says the team will also be looking at different setup ideas to try and find more performance.
“I think we were predicting that Montreal would not be ideal and it was surprisingly good. And then Austria, we thought that the high speed (portions of the track) would save our non-performance in the low speed but it never did. I think we were equal with some of the good guys in the high speed but the car was never in the right place and we suffered from all the conditions, from understeer to oversteer. It was never any good.
“Let’s see if Silverstone suits the characteristics a bit better. We are bringing some bits and ideas to Silverstone, and analyze from there. But it has got to go forward, that’s for sure.”