Mercedes is not taking it for granted that they will quickly return to competition after their weak 2022 campaign, team principal Toto Wolff said.
The team failed to win the Constructors’ Championship this year for the first time since 2013. Tired of a car that hadn’t raced since the start of the season, they didn’t win a race until the final round.
Wolff said his team looked to past instances of a team’s F1 dominance ending to understand where it went wrong. In the year He cited Red Bull’s titles from 2010 to 2013 and Ferrari’s success with Michael Schumacher in the first half of the 2000s.
“At Ferrari, to give an example, they lost the entire top management and key driver,” Wolff said. “I think it’s something you can get back.
“With Red Bull, it was fundamental that the power unit rule was turned upside down. [they had] There are no jobs [engine] Agreement, basically. So it was the basic parameters that changed. “
As the team looks to find a way to return to the competitiveness it once had in the V6 hybrid turbo era, Mercedes is looking at that and thinking, ‘We better watch out.’
“We are analyzing the reasons behind the sudden underperformance of teams that have been dominant in the past,” he said. “They can recover pretty well: a rule change, people leaving, basically a changed tire.”
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In the year Despite their poor start to 2022, Wolff said the team’s performance in the end was “respectable” and showed they still had the core resources to win consistently.
“The rule changed, we were wrong. But all the other pillars are still there and we need to adjust and understand the system. And I am 100% sure that it was a difficult year that was necessary to re-invigorate and re-invigorate the organization.
“We won eight. [championships] More than 100 seeds in a row. It brought us back down to earth, made us appreciate the feeling of winning in Brazil, and also made us understand how hard it is to recover – not from [losing] Same race as before, but with not enough races.
“So I think in a few years we’ll look back and say, ‘That was really important.’ My view is not one season, not two years. My view is in 10 years, I’ll look back and say, ‘We were consistent.’
“We were. [respectable] sometime this year. We won the competition. We had a couple dozen or so stages in the race. We were third on the road and that’s respectable.
But he said he did not take it for granted that Mercedes would return to their favored form before 2021.
“I’m not sure at all. I am a glass half empty person and I never believe that the work we are doing is good enough. I’m not sure we’ll get back to the level where we’re competing for championships because you have to know the competition is strong. But we will do our best, set our goals high and try to reach them.
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