Mercedes have ominous warning for Max Verstappen, Red Bull and other F1 teams

Mercedes has issued an ominous warning to reigning world champion Max Verstappen and his Red Bull team along with all the others on the F1 grid during the launch of their 2022 car.

At the digital launch event of the new Mercedes AMG F1 W13 E Performance, team principal Toto Wolff confirmed that there was no sense of entitlement in the camp. Even though the Silver Arrows have won eight constructors' titles in a row to set an unprecedented record in F1, they are starting the new era from zero. He said:

“It [eight championships] feels a little bit surreal that as a team, we were able to achieve that eight times in a row. Obviously, there was this shadow with the drivers’ championship, with Lewis’ [Hamilton] championship and the Abu Dhabi situation, but let’s look into the future and definitely we want to continue where we started but we have no sense of entitlement.”

The Austrian commended the job the entire factory had done to get the car ready, especially with a raft of regulatory changes that made their jobs a lot more difficult. He said:

“When people think about a Formula 1 team, they see all of us on track, the hundred-odd people that we are. But as I said before, there are more than 2000 that are working on the power unit and the car. And this is their creativity and their grit and their skill coming together and we’ve had... that’s a little bit of an inside situation, where we’ve had to tell people not to work too many hours. Because when you go towards 100 hours a week, this is where you need to stop.”

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Mercedes 'desperate' to get 2022 engine on track ahead of new season

While Toto Wolff was full of praise for the entire team and the work that has gone into the W13, the Silver Arrows are reportedly 'absolutely desperate' to get their power unit development back on track.

Earlier, Mercedes High Performance Powertrains (HPP) boss Hyvel Thomas had confessed that his team is working round the clock to adapt the new power unit to the car whilst following the regulations in place. In a team video, Thomas said:

“The 2022 car is very, very different. We know the aerodynamics are different. And from all the things that we’ve been told and from all the work we’ve done with the team here at Brackley, we believe that the car will be doing slightly different things, and the requests from the driver will be different as they go through the corners than they were in previous years.”

The W13 will be taken out for a shakedown around Silverstone before the first pre-season testing session in Barcelona later this month.