Wolff: You can’t flatter yourself that we will win right away

In the second half of the season, the Mercedes team noticeably picked up speed and won the winning double in Brazil, and George Russell climbed to the top step of the podium for the first time. Despite the progress, Toto Wolff urges his subordinates not to overestimate these achievements and to keep working hard in preparation for 2023.

At the start of the championship, the Mercedes W13 car was very sensitive to vertical build-up, which made it difficult to compete with Red Bull Racing and Ferrari. Although the situation began to improve towards the end of the season, the team leader admitted that there are still no guarantees that Hamilton and Russell will be able to challenge for the title next year.

“We think we have largely solved the wobble problem, although it was not possible to solve it completely on the 2022 machine,” Wolff said on the Beyond the Grid podcast. “But we think next year will be a little easier for us. We’re partially changing the architecture and layout of the machine, and this should allow us to move in the right direction.

But with this new technical arrangement sometimes it turns out that you reveal a problem and then it turns out that someone else is hiding behind it, so we have to keep working humbly and not be deceived that we will immediately start winning races and will once again take victory in the claim championship.”

According to Wolff, a factor such as a limited budget does not play a role in this situation and it would hardly be any different even if there were no financial constraints: “There would be no difference, because you can’t say we don’t have enough -some opportunities , the right tools or time. Rather, the point was that in order to get to the root of the problem, it was necessary to act gradually, removing layer by layer.

I am proud that we acted very courageously in the development of W13. I feel proud when I look at her narrow side pontoons – they had nothing to do with the problem of insufficient efficiency of the machine … There were also many other areas where everything was fine: the power plant worked perfectly all season, with reliability was also okay.

When it comes to the chassis, I believe we had good peak downforce as well, but the circuits we raced didn’t allow us to use it. And I absolutely believe that in order to succeed, you have to make mistakes and survive failures. There is not a single team in the world in any sport that would win all the championships it has competed in.

Studying is not easy, because talking about problems is one thing, but the team passes the real test when the difficulties are repeated every weekend. Looking back, I understand that I may have put too much pressure on the team in some areas, but I also learned some lessons from this.