24/03/2023
NEWS STORY
Toto Wolff admits that if making the Mercedes look like a Red Bull or even a London bus is what is needed get to the front again, he will do it.
The Austrian was speaking after his team trailed Red Bull once again - and Fernando Alonso's Aston Martin - but at least finished ahead of the Ferraris.
Having said following the season opener that Mercedes would return to the drawing board, in the aftermath of Sunday's Saudi Arabian Grand Prix he shed a little light on how challenging for wins again might be achieved.
"If you look at the Red Bulls, they are just so quick," he told Sky Sports. "But I think we understand the car more and I'm looking optimistically to the future.
"We just need to put it in a different window," he continued. "We're changing the bodywork of the car, how the floor works, all of these things, mechanically we're looking at certain areas. The team in Brackley is flat-out.
"We headed into one direction last year and we wanted to have it work. It worked and it got better and better. But now, coming out this year, we really realised it's a dead-end street.
"These are the facts and everybody knows that now," he added, "so we turned around and we are running fast out of that dead-end street. We can see them (Red Bull), they're just far away at the moment."
Asked whether the revised car will bear a resemblance to the RB19, he replied: "I don't know, you can call it a Red Bull or Aston Martin concept. But at the end, if it would look like a double-decker bus, we would do it if it was fast.
"They can put a little sticker, Red Bull, (on the car) if they want to have it," he laughed. "It's just about raw performance. We have no dogma on who invented it.
"I think we're making big elephant steps at the moment, going forward. It's going to be a long time until they are adequate to challenge Red Bull, but it's a super-fun journey to climb back."