Imola GP: The 2023 F1 season is up and running with five rounds of championship under the belt. With the culmination of Miami GP, Mercedes F1 team has seen yet another disappointing outing. Though the race pace of W-14 was better than the qualifying, the road to the front still looks like a long one for Lewis Hamilton and Co. Earlier this season, Mercedes honcho Toto Wolff admitted that the team probably needed to go back to the drawing board and settle for a whole new design. Now, in a recent development, Mercedes has planned to roll out major updates for the next race at the Emilia Romagna GP. Follow InsideSport on GOOGLE NEWS / Follow Formula 1 Updates with InsideSport.IN.
Toto Wolff also opened up about the greatest limitation that the team faced in this process. The Austrian boss blamed “ride control” for not being able to work better on suspension. This was limiting the team from extracting extra tenths of seconds. Mercedes got the design terribly wrong that the start of the new season after a major overhaul in rules. The narrow sidepods, which the team considered as secret guns, did not work as their reputation. Now, a year later, the team did manage to find its way on the top of the midfield, but that is clearly not enough.
Not only the on-track performances, the team has been struggling with rumours of a deteriorating relationship with Lewis Hamilton. The Briton recently criticized the team for not taking his suggestions into consideration. Recently, the team’s decision to send Lewis after 7 cars into the qualifying cost him a spot in Q3. Amidst all this, there is a lot riding on the success of the technical switch of James Allison and Mike Elliott.
Toto Wolff takes a pragmatic approach on upcoming update
Wolff is one of the most performances driven figures in the current F1 paddock. Fans easily witness both his joy and frustration as and how the on-track shenanigans unfold. He has seen an incredible run with the team winning eight consecutive constructors’ title. Now, he seldom finds the team at their habitual place at the top. In these circumstances, there are a lot of hopes riding on each upgrade. However, in a recent interview, while discussing the same, Wolff took a rather practical take on the situation.
He stated that there is a highly thin possibility that these upgrades will prove to be a silver bullet. “We need to manage our own expectations, because we’re bringing an update package that’s going to consist of new suspension parts, and bodywork and some other things,” he said as reported by Autosport.
“But I have never in my 15 years in F1 seen a silver bullet being introduced, where suddenly you unlock half a second of performance. So, I very much doubt that this is going to happen here. [I am hoping] we can go more to a stable platform, and then we should see where the baseline is and what we can do from there,” added the 51-year-old.
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