Toto Wolff reveals the team Mercedes is drawing inspiration from the grid

Toto Wolff claims Mercedes is encouraged and inspired by the turn around in performance for the Aston Martin team.

The Executive director of the Silver Arrows squad revealed they will be tackling the issues with their car design philosophy the following week after the Bahrain GP.

Speaking to Sportskeeda and on-site media about the next steps to review their car concept, the Mercedes executive director said:

“What next? That’s a good question and we will tackle that straight at the beginning of the week because where we are is - when you look at where we were at the end of the season, it seemed like we caught up a lot, it was just a matter of which circuits suited us and which not."

"We’ve almost doubled if not tripled the gap to Red Bull and this is what we need to look at. Everything between the Ferrari, the Aston, that’s just a side show. And having said that, what Aston Martin was able to achieve is a good inspiration because, they came back from two seconds off the pace to probably being the second quickest team on the road."

"And with us everything is bad, maybe the single lap pace was still good, but in the race we saw the consequences and put it bluntly, we were lacking downforce and when you are lacking downforce you are sliding the tyres. You are going backwards.”

According to Wolff, their current design concept, featuring no side-pods, has not delivered the results they expected and they will be reconsidering the design philosophy as early as the week after the Bahrain GP. He believes they had caught up with the front runners by the end of the 2022 season, but coming into 2023 the gap to the front is very big and they are refraining from spending another year developing the car.

Praising Aston Martin for their turn around in performance, Wolff noted their improvement in pace by two seconds since their last performance in Bahrain. Drawing inspiration from their turnaround, the Austrian believes it is necessary to address their performance issues as they thoroughly lag behind in several areas of performance with their car.

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Toto Wolff suggests Mercedes has been looking at other concepts and have a clear idea what direction to take

Wolff revealed Mercedes have been looking at other design philosophies to adopt for a while, and that it is not a current development after their dismal performance. Without getting to any specifics of what their design philosophy will be or the direction they will take, the Austrian revealed that the Silver Arrows squad was certain about the direction their car design and development were going to take.

Asked about other ideas they are considering in terms of their design concept, Wolff replied:

“We’ve looked at other ideas and haven’t stood still. And that’s not only since two weeks since we saw that we haven’t been able to close the gap. But we’ve done it since a while, just to be open minded. Still with an emphasis making this work, we have already looked at different concepts.”

On whether they know what direction they will take with the current car, the Mercedes team boss said:

“I think it is pretty clear where we should be going, we just need to make the data work and re- establishing a solid baseline, saying this is where we are, there are surprises in the other direction.”

Wolff has expressed his frustration over their car design after the race and qualifying. Their customer team Aston Martin was able to beat them to the podium, despite having the same engine, gearbox, and rear suspension. With the Mercedes customer team performing better than the factory one, it has been more pressuring for the Brackley squad to find solutions immediately.

Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton finished fifth and George Russell finished seventh, both behind an Aston Martin. To add to their frustrations the AMR23 which beat them, was produced in their very own wind tunnel.

From Wolff’s remarks throughout the Bahrain GP weekend, it is clear that they want to be back to winning races again, which will require reviewing their design philosophy and taking immediate decisions which will eventually help them turnaround their performance.