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Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff continues to back the cost cap restrictions despite their continuing struggles in the ongoing season. After an underwhelming start to its 2023 campaign, the team is now working on a major overhaul of its car design which will incur additional financial expenditure.
F1 introduced the budget cap in 2021 to equalize the playing field for all the teams. In the current era, teams cannot blindly spend resources to solve a problem but have to rather do it in a calculated and sustainable manner.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff acknowledged that "this is what we wanted" as the teams collectively agreed on the rules to have a financially sustainable future. Wolff admitted in an interview with Motorsport:
"This is what we wanted. We wanted to have a more financially sustainable future, we wanted to have 10 teams that are capable of racing well with the aerodynamic testing restrictions that are advantageous for the ones that are in the back. All of that is to create a very competitive field."
Mercedes were one of the biggest spenders in F1 before the cost-cap regulations kicked in. Now the German team cannot make wholesale changes to the car when it desperately needs to bring major upgrades to the W14.
However, Wolff is confident that improvements can be made shortly in the cost-cap era. Citing the example of Aston Martin, Wolff said that engineering ingenuity can help a team make a huge leap in performance.
The 51-year-old Mercedes team boss explained:
"Where we are today, we just need to acknowledge that one team has done a better job than all the others, then Aston Martin is the next team you need to acknowledge because they've just made a huge giant step forward and it's just down to good work."
He added:
"There's no magic and there's not one item on a car that makes it mysteriously fast. It's just solid engineering and all the areas being put together. So I think we need to aim for the stars."
Toto Wolff is hoping to emulate what Aston Martin achieved over the winter entering the 2023 season.
Wolff reveals why Mercedes stuck with its 2022 car concept for the ongoing season
.After suffering a terrible start to their 2022 campaign, Mercedes' hopes of emerging as front-runners were revitalized in the second half of the season. This came with a significant improvement in pace coupled with a 1-2 finish in Brazil.
However, entering the 2023 season, the team realized it had taken a step in the wrong direction. Toto Wolff described the late-season improvements in the previous year as 'the perfect storm' that eventually misled the team.
He said:
"It got better and better and better. We were competitive in the American races. We won in Interlagos, we knew that Abu Dhabi [where Mercedes struggled] is a bit different."
"That was the perfect storm for us. It wasn't good for 2023. We thought we were on the right track and the concept works. But it didn't."
