"We are not looking at the lady next door" - Mercedes to stay 'faithful' to 2022 F1 design concepts despite mixed results

Mercedes chief Toto Wolff believes the team will remain loyal to the current design concept of the W13.

The Austrian feels deflecting from their current model will be pointless, as the car has shown pace several times and just needs to be optimized correctly.

Speaking on a team media call after the Miami GP, Wolff said:

"I think we are still committed to the current concept and we need to because if we don’t believe and give the other one a fifty percent chance, then you better switch now. So we are faithful to the current concept. We are not looking at the lady next door if we like it more or not, because its still good.

"As a matter fact, we need to understand before making a decision of switching to another concept, where this one goes wrong. And what is the goodness of the concept and what is the badness of the concept.

He continued:

"That is a question you can only respond to yourself, which I would be asking ourselves to get an answer on after Barcelona because that is the real correlation we have. By then, we are gonna look ourselves in the mirror and say did we get it wrong or not.”

Wolff is adamant about sticking to their current car design concept, which has shown potential and was quick in Friday Free Practice ahead of the Miami GP.

Despite the car getting back to its performance woes on Saturday and Sunday, Wolff believes Mercedes cannot make a decision on whether to change the concept until Barcelona.

With the next race being at a track where they have tested the car before, it will be a decent benchmark to correlate data and make any decisions.

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Mercedes admit to being lost with their car concept since the beginning of the season

Toto Wolff did not want to go into detail about Mercedes' internal mindset regarding their difficult car. However, he acknowledged that they were lost in getting their package to work.

The Silver Arrows team chief believes the prolonged process of understanding data and improvising the car is making it a relentless task.

When asked if the team is lost when it comes to their current car’s design philosophy, Wolff replied:

“We’ve been straight from the beginning flying in the fog a little bit. It's clear that there is potential in the car and she’s fast but we just don’t understand how to unlock the potential. It is probably a car that is super difficult to drive and on the edge, getting in and out of the performance window, more out than in and dissecting the data with a scalpel is just a painful process, because it takes very long.

"The data sometimes does not show what the drivers tell us, certainly they have their hands full with a car that is just not at all comfortable to drive, nice to drive and predictable to drive. The data don’t show these big swings. So we haven’t had this situation before in any of the years, that it didn’t just correlate with what we see on the screens with what the driver feels and that is making it even more difficult."

Wolff believes the undrivable Mercedes W13 makes it difficult for drivers to perform their task of gathering data and extracting the maximum from the car.

While the car functioned better in Miami than in Imola, the team is in a rush for answers in their quest to optimize performance.