Toto Wolff has implored Mercedes to "draw the right conclusions" over its 2025 F1 car after an up-and-down campaign last year. The Brackley-based squad, at the hands of now-departed Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, secured four grand prix victories but slumped to fourth in the constructors' standings, despite scoring more points than in 2023 when it finished runner-up to Red Bull. Overall, the Austrian believes the leading teams in F1 are condemned to another uncertain season ahead of them, given the perplexing nature of the current regulations. Since F1 reintroduced the ground-effect era at the start of 2022, the entire paddock has struggled in stages to understand its delicate relationship with traditional aerodynamics and how to strike the correct balance between the floor of the car and adding downforce to it through upgrades. It is something Wolff does not believe any team will be able to completely remedy in the final year of the current generation of rules. "The trick is to be on the good side as often as possible," the 53-year-old told German publication Auto Motor und Sport . "You start to correlate patterns - race tracks where your car is good, practice sessions where you pushed your car, tyre compounds with which the car harmonises better, track temperatures that are good for the car." Article continues below
Sharp end balancing act
Nonetheless, Wolff has called on his team to adapt accordingly to what it established last year and what it has learned over the current off-season. "I hope that we draw the right conclusions from this over the winter and adjust the development direction for the 2025 car," he said. "We won't be able to get rid of these fluctuations completely. We will also see them next year with all the teams."
Last term saw four teams take multiple grand prix victories and considerable swings in performance between rounds and across conditions. Wolff outlined how the German marque stacked up against its closest competitors, underlining a degree of readability to a pattern that was otherwise difficult to predict. "All four teams that have won races [last year] have experienced these ups and downs," the Mercedes team principal said. "Nobody has designed a car that was consistently good across all race tracks and all weather conditions. "McLaren had a great car for maximum downforce and hot weather. The Ferrari was also more on that side. "Our car was fast when there were fast corners and the temperatures were cold. The Red Bull could sometimes do one thing and sometimes the other."
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