Mercedes boss Toto Wolff denied that the team will turn its attention to 2023 for the time being. Still don't know enough about the new cars
Mercedes again had a difficult weekend this season as they took a step backwards in terms of performance in Monaco. Even so, CEO and team boss Toto Wolff denied any possibility of turning his attention to next year's car just yet. According to him, it is necessary to understand enough what is right and wrong with a project before changing it.
According to Wolff, Mercedes doesn't have the robust knowledge of the W13, at least yet, to be sure of what to change and how to change it. So if it decided to go for the W14 concept, it would risk changing things that are in the right place and keeping structural errors of the current machine.
"If you want to change the concept, you need to understand what will make a new concept faster than the current one. If we knew, we would have already worked in that direction [for this year]," he told the French Motorsport-Total website.
"At the moment, I still believe in what our team tells us, which is to keep bringing updates and understand our car better. Without that, it doesn't make sense to start working on the W14," he followed.
"At a certain point, if we still can't decrease the disadvantage, we have to make decisions for next year. Anything that can't be changed in the current car, whether it's on the architecture or aerodynamics side and hinders us, needs to be reviewed. But we are not at this point yet, because not everything has been identified.
"At least we will have more wind tunnel time starting this month to bring some evolutions and better understand the car," he concluded.
Formula One returns next weekend, June 10-12, for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in Baku.