Mercedes GP Doesn't Want To Panic Although It Can't Compete With Red Bull Racing And Aston Martin

Mercedes GP boss, Toto Wolff. (Photo: Twitter @MercedesAMGF1)

JAKARTA - Mercedes GP has not been able to break Red Bull Racing's dominance in the 2023 Formula 1 (F1) race. In fact, Mercedes has lost the competition to Aston Martin, which has led Fernando Alonso to consistently win the podium.

The achievement of the Mercedes GP duo is actually not too bad. Lewis Hamilton consistently finishes in the top six positions. In six races, he has only been on the podium once, namely the second podium in Australia.

While George Russell got worse results. He never felt the podium and once had to end the race early.

Although his team's results haven't been as impressive, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff says he doesn't want to rush into an update for the W1 race car.

He said he had brought a number of updates and refreshments for their car at the Monaco Grand Prix last weekend, although the improvement was considered to be far from ideal.

Nonetheless, he believes his team is now moving in the right direction with the development of the W14. He hopes that more significant improvements can be seen at the Spanish Grand Prix in the coming weekend.

"In my opinion, it is very difficult because we are competing with Aston Martin and Ferrari. But we really have to be careful and collect more data while at Barcelona. This is a new basis," said Wolff, as quoted from Antara, Tuesday, May 30th.

"It's more about understanding what this car can do now, how to manage that, and we're really good at that."

"Even with the old package which was not very good or bad at the start of the season, we managed to win the race at Interlagos (in 2022) in such a dominant way that we will achieve that," he explained.

Drastic weather changes in Monaco which suddenly rained down, he continued, were a challenge as well as an advantage for the team because they could deal with it perfectly and made the team ahead of Ferrari.

Wolff also admits that there is still much to be learned about the performance of their cars given the large number of new parts.

"We've just collected the data and prepared the car in a good way. For the last two and a half or three years, we've had a very good race car. So on Sunday, May 28, it looks more positive than it looked in qualifying," he said.