F1 | Wolff harsh: “We are distant. It's difficult to be optimistic.”

Two retirements, one due to an accident, one due to mechanical failure. This is the bitter outcome of the standings at the end of the Australian Grand Prix. However, beyond the mere point of view of the result, there is an even more worrying situation, namely that of the competitiveness of the single-seater.

After a good first weekend in Bahrain, where overall the W15 did not seem to be that far from Ferrari, if not for the overheating problems that had somehow hidden its potential, on the contrary Saudi Arabia and Australia clearly highlighted this which doesn't work with this car.

The Sakhir track, largely featuring low and medium speed corners, had highlighted the best characteristics of the single-seater, which had actually performed well in the low-traffic sections, with a trend that had already begun to be observed last season. However, already in Bahrain, in those few corners with rapid changes of direction where a stable platform and lots of aerodynamic load is needed, the weak points had also emerged, which then recurred both in Jeddah and Melbourne.

The problem of the lack of aerodynamic load had a significant impact on both tracks, an issue never hidden by the drivers even before the start of the season. The need to then lower the car to find that missing load then triggered the skipping, taking away the necessary confidence from the drivers. If in Jeddah the time found on the straights with a very unloaded wing mitigated those difficulties, here in Melbourne we see very few elements. On Friday the car was competitive in the slower sections, but suffered a heavy gap in all the other areas of the track, making it impossible to hope to be able to fight for the most noble positions on the grid.

At the end of the Grand Prix, which saw the Star conclude with a double retirement, Toto Wolff did not hide his disappointment at what he described as a painful situation: “It's difficult to digest. I would be lying if I said I felt positive about our situation, lying if I said I was optimistic. But we must go beyond negative thoughts, thinking that we will be able to overcome this difficult phase. But today is a negative feeling,” said the Mercedes Team Principal.

The hope was to have a car that was not only more competitive, but also easier to drive, also listening to the feedback from the drivers, who often expressed rather clear opinions on the weak points of the 2022 and 2023 single-seaters. However, while on the one hand Wolff sees the progress made by Ferrari and McLaren, on the other there is a Mercedes still struggling with problems to which it has not yet found an answer.

“We started the season thinking that the car was better than last year. Then we look at the car and the race last season, with Leclerc out and Sainz fourth, because then there was the penalty, but the performances were worth a fourth place. McLaren, on the other hand, was at the back of the group, whereas today it is ahead of us. On the one hand this shows that, when you manage to do things in the right way, the situation can be reversed, we must continue to believe, but at the moment it is very difficult.”

Toto Wolff, Team Principal and CEO, Mercedes-AMG F1 Team

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

“When I look at the positives, I think we've taken a lot of potential underlying causes out of the equation. We weren't sure about our suspensions. We weren't sure about the stiffness of the gearbox mount. We had a steering rack that was vibrating and that problem also disappeared on this year's car, but basically anything we see in the wind tunnel has no correlation to what happens on the track,” explained Wolff, underlining how by exclusion the team is trying to eliminate all the elements about which he had doubts in recent years.

The underlying doubt is that, contrary to what James Allison claimed after the tests, according to the Team Principal there is no correlation between the data recorded in the wind tunnel and what actually happens on the track. A problem that, in reality, the Brackley team has been carrying around since the beginning of the current regulatory cycle, so much so that in recent seasons it has also made important investments to modernize the structures and simulation tools, also updating the CFD.

“In my career, in everything I've done before, both in finance and investments, I knew where to intervene, where to operate and I knew that sometimes it takes time. In the Williams days [di cui possedeva una quota], I knew what was missing, but I don't think we're missing anything here. It's just a matter of what's happening with the car, something that we can't see though. It's like a kind of switch that turns on and off. When you turn it on, you see the progress, as happened with McLaren and Ferrari. And that's the difference between last year and this year. We have to understand, because it's really painful,” Wolff added.

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes

Photo by: Mark Horsburgh / Motorsport Images

On several occasions during free practice, Mercedes proved to be fast in some way, although this is partly due to the fact that the Mercedes-Benz engines have shown a certain tendency to exploit more aggressive mappings since Friday. However, when there is a leap to be made, beyond the engine issue, the opponents manage to progress, while in the last two events the W15 has not been able to grow and keep up with the pace of its rivals.

“Until last weekend I had the feeling that there was a good car. I haven't lost the feeling that this can be a good car, because there are sessions throughout the weekend where we are fast and have good performance, but the problem is that then we slip back again. In free practice we were third, in qualifying seventh. And in the race we were even further apart. You could see that the McLarens and Ferraris were faster by at least seven tenths already on Friday and we were unable to respond,” added Wolff.