Why ‘no slower’ Mercedes is giving up on its F1 car concept

After a troubled pre-season testing run, the German car manufacturer brushed itself off, dug deep, got to the bottom of the problems it faced with the W13, and late in the season won the Brazilian Grand Prix. 

Fast forward to now and an almost identical six tenths gap – from a 0.680 seconds deficit to pole position in 2022 to a 0.632 seconds gap this year – has triggered a completely different reaction. 

Rather than it pointing to a good baseline for Mercedes to move forward from in the annual F1 development war, it has instead thrown up the white flag. 

Within minutes of the end of qualifying, and even before George Russell and Lewis Hamilton had sat down with the engineers, team boss Toto Wolff declared that title hopes were all but over and that a new car concept was needed. 

“I don’t think this package is going to be competitive eventually,” he said. 

“We gave it our best shot all over the winter, and now we just need to all regroup and sit down with the engineers, who are totally not dogmatic about anything. 

“There are no holy cows and we need to decide what is the development direction that we want to pursue in order to be competitive to win races.” 

F1 teams are normally eager to wait a few races before properly judging how their cars stack up against the opposition – especially as different circuits can juggle up the competitive order quite a lot as strengths and weaknesses are exposed. 

So Wolff declaring it virtually game over with the W14 after just a single qualifying session may seem quite strange. However, there are some solid reasons behind his stance. 

Chief among these is that Mercedes knows it is a completely different situation to last year when there was a mismatch between the potential of the W13 and what it was seeing on track. 

It knew that somewhere deep within the quirks of its 2022 car was an awful lot of downforce that it just needed to be able to extract somehow without it triggering porpoising. 

This time around the team is a different place. The W14 is performing exactly as the team anticipated, and it is not a case of there being a lot of lap time that it knows can be unlocked further down the road. 

The team has admitted that a pretty big update is being worked on, potentially ready for around the time of the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix in mid-May, but that may only bring a couple of tenths. 

That is not the game-changing performance Mercedes needs to be able to take on…