As Mercedes lags 0.6s behind Red Bull, Toto Wolff admits that it is time to go back to the drawing board.

The move marks a stark turnaround for the Austrian who defended the whole zero-sidepod concept throughout 2022 and allowed the team to stick with it again this year.

However, after watching his drivers qualify 6th and 7th for the Bahrain Grand Prix, 06s off the pace of pole-man Max Verstappen, and even out-paced by Fernando Alonso's Aston Martin, not to mention both Ferraris, Wolff admits that enough is enough.

"I don't think this package is going to be competitive eventually," he told reporters in the aftermath of the session. "We gave it our best go over the winter and now we need to regroup, sit down with the engineers, who are totally not dogmatic about anything, there are no holy cows, and decide what is the development direction that we want to pursue in order to be competitive to win races.

"It is not like last year when you score many podiums and eventually you get there," he added, "I'm sure that we can win races this season, but it's the mid and long-term that we need to look at and which decisions we need to make."

Mercedes had always promised upgrades, but following tonight’s session, Wolff admits that this isn't going to be enough.

"I don't know what is going to happen this year," he said, "we may find a silver bullet next week and unlock five-tenths in the car, but I haven't seen any silver bullets before.

"You never know," he added, "but definitely mid-term and long-term, we just need to have a car that is able to make us fight for an eighth championship.

"In this team we blame the problem and not the person," he continued, "and at the end I have responsibilities and I'd need to fire myself if I wanted to do something. So, we have all the ingredients to be successful, the people and infrastructure that won eight championships in a row.

"We got it wrong last year, we thought we could fix it by sticking to this concept of car and it didn't work out. We need to switch our focus on to what we believe can be the right direction, what it is that we are missing and therefore those data points from this weekend are very important.

"We have seen on the GPS where we are lacking performance and we have seen where we are good, and we just need to sort out what that is and whether that is sticking bigger sidepods on the car or really subtle things that bring performance is a different question. Definitely within the group we will embark on untrodden paths."

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