"The back of that car is Mercedes", F1 pundit's major indictment of the German team's plight

F1 pundits and presenters Simon Lazenby and Karun Chandhok recently spoke about how Aston Martin was able to overtake Mercedes despite using the same resources and power units.

Since Aston Martin bought its power unit from the German-British team, it is no surprise that several parts surrounding the power unit will be the same for both teams. Despite being similar in certain areas, Aston Martin is much faster than the Silver Arrows.

Speaking on Sky Sports' podcast on YouTube, Lanzenby explained how the rear of an Aston Martin, which consists of the engine, rear suspension, gearbox, hydraulics, etc., is exactly the same as the rear of a Mercedes. Yet the latter is unable to perform better than the former. The F1 pundit said:

"The rear of that car, the rear of the Aston Martin, is effectively Mercedes, isn't it? So you look at the engine, the gearbox, the hydraulics, and the rear suspension, is exactly the same. Mercedes and Aston Martin are exactly the same in that area."

Furthermore, Karun Chandhok chipped in and pointed out how Aston Martin also rents the wind tunnel from the Silver Arrows. Hence, the Brackley-based team could not come up with an excuse that their wind tunnel is not working properly, since Aston Martin were easily able to develop a good car. Chandhok added:

"The other thing, they also rent the wind tunnel from Mercedes. So you can't really go to the old [excuse] 'oh, out wind tunnel belt is slipping a bit and we are getting some correlation problems' which other teams have had. Because, clearly, Mercedes' tunnel is fine."

This further proves how the customer team is using the same resources and parts as the works team and is able to perform much better than them on track.

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Mercedes team boss believes that his team can bounce back and chase Red Bull with a new car design

Toto Wolff recently admitted that his team is massively off the pace and needs to make drastic changes to their design and concept in order to catch the reigning world champions and the rest of the top teams.

The Austrian also mentioned how Aston Martin made some difficult decisions to achieve a steeper development curve. He said:

“We’ve lost a year in development in order to have a steeper development curve and you just need to take these decisions. Aston Martin took that decision, and they came back strong. So if we start from our base, maybe we can come back strong and chase the Red Bulls. That’s the ambition.”

It is highly unlikely that the German-British team will be able to catch Red Bull in the 2023 F1 season. However, they might do so next year as they try to stick to their concept and improve it in 2023.