Toto Wolff wants Mercedes to be motivated by the turnarounds in form of McLaren and Ferrari in 2023 as it looks to recover from a poor start to the season.
Mercedes finished second in the constructors’ championship last season but is currently fourth, only one point ahead of Aston Martin. The gap to Ferrari is 86 points after a strong start to the year for the Scuderia, and with McLaren also ahead of Mercedes, Wolff says those teams have shown what is possible in terms of mid-season improvements.
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“I think you can only look back and say ‘how did last season run?’ and you can see the fluctuations in performance,” Wolff said. “Ferrari was not very good and then eventually turned it around, and Lewis was the second force in the later stage of the championship.
“And the same with McLaren. It was an even bigger swing. They were not getting themselves out of Q1 and in the end were regular podium contenders. So I think these swings will still happen. At the moment we are not able to fight them, but we will. That’s certainly a realistic target, much more realistic than Max [Verstappen].”
Wolff believes Verstappen has already shown he will win this year’s championship given the performance he extracts from the Red Bull, despite three other drivers currently being within a race win of the championship lead.
“No one is going to catch Max this year. His driving and the car are just spectacular,” said Wolff. “You can see the way he manages the tires… and basically this season now is best of the rest. That’s the fight that’s on.
“Hopefully we can catch up to the McLarens and to the Ferraris and fight for P2. This is what it is this year and what it was last year, and we had a P2 last year, so…
“I think I wouldn’t say it (is boring) because the guy who is ahead is the deserving winner and I believe that we’ve seen the Ferraris are closer to him in some of the previous races and I think we can be closer to the Ferraris than we’ve shown today.
“So it is still exciting. I don’t know how the race (in Japan) was for you guys to watch. I’m just looking at our cars and split times so I never have a correct picture of what’s actually happening out there. But I believe it’s pretty close between P3 – and P2 at times – and P8 and I expect that there will be some action and we just have got to push ourselves to to provide a better show and eventually challenge them.”