Lewis Hamilton is without an F1 race win for two years with Mercedes unable to compete with their Red Bull rivals who are dominating the sport with their superior cars
Lewis Hamilton wants a competitive Mercedes car this year to return to F1 title contention (Image: Getty Images)
Toto Wolff has issued a positive update regarding his Mercedes team’s prospects for the upcoming Formula 1 season.
The the past two years, his team has fielded cars with designs that came from Mercedes following the wrong technical path. As a result, high points have been few and far between.
They have managed just one win since the end of 2021, when George Russell took victory in Brazil the following year. Lewis Hamilton hasn’t won a race in more than two years, hampered by his car while rival Max Verstappen has been smashing records left and right.
Wolff hopes his team can get back to winning ways with the W15 set to take to the track this season. It is far too early to know how competitive the car will be relative to the machines that their rivals will field.
But former F1 racer Anthony Davidson, who has been driving the W15 on the simulator, has given the Austrian reason to be optimistic. “He was driving Melbourne [in the sim] and he said, ‘The car feels like a car for the first time in two years…'” Wolff told The Telegraph.
He did, however, go on to make it clear that he will be very cautious about getting himself excited for the season ahead. He added: “Obviously, I would love this to correlate to the track, but we’ve seen in the last two years that this was not always the case.”
There had been some external suggestions of pressure on Wolff’s role as team principal, as a result of Mercedes’ decline in fortunes. But he confirmed he has now committed to extending his stay in that role going forward, agreeing to a three-year extension up until the end of 2026 after discussing the matter with fellow co-owners Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Ola Kallenius.
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He said: “I think the most important thing between the three of us is that we trust each other. At the end of the day, as a shareholder myself, I want the best return on investment. And the best return on investment is winning.
“I’m not going to try to hang on to a position that I think somebody is going to do better than me. I make sure that I have people around who can tell me otherwise. In the end the three of us decided, ‘Let’s do it again’.
“I’m a co-shareholder. I’m on the board. These are things which will not change whatever executive, or non-executive, role I have. But I feel good. The risk for me is always more bore-out than burnout – and that’s why I embrace the challenges we have today, even though they sometimes feel very, very difficult to manage.”
