Mercedes admits more “difficult” weekends are to be expected despite a better understanding of their 2022 car.
After overcoming the porpoising and bouncing problems that dominated the first half of this season, the Brackley-based team is still trying to more consistently find the sweet spot of the W13 on all kinds of circuits.
In Zandvoort, Mercedes did just that and was firmly in the battle for victory, but Wolff concedes there will be races where that won’t be the case.
“Our performance is fundamentally ingrained in the car concept as it is, but we are now understanding better how everything interacts,” said team boss Toto Wolff via Motorsport.com.
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“I think we can tune the car more precisely to fit and to target the performance window.
“Having said that, there will be races that are better for us and there might be some on the calendar that will be very difficult.
“So you need to stay realistic in my opinion. We won’t be fighting for pole positions on all the other race tracks, but at least we need to really get us back to this point for next year.”
And Wolff explained why taking the rough with the smooth this year is actually beneficial to the team achieving their goal of being contenders in 2023.
“That bad one [at Spa] was really necessary in order to comprehend why it was going good here [in Zandvoort],” he said.
“As weird as it sounds for a high-tech science lab on wheels, the data doesn’t seem to correlate this year. And so we are gathering data on the track in order to put the puzzle together.
“We have added a few new bits of the puzzle to comprehend for next year. But, as I said before, I don’t expect the weekends like this every single week until the end of the year.
“There will be bumpier circuits that will not allow us to run the car where we want to run, and there will be tracks where there is a lot of drag limitation. So we’re not going to win the next seven races.”
