Lewis Hamilton's 2024 hopes hang in balance as Mercedes make huge F1 change
Toto Wolff declared Mercedes will start their 2024 car plans from scratch after the team's lowest moment in its history.
Lewis Hamilton finished the Brazilian Grand Prix eighth, more than a minute behind winner Max Verstappen. And George Russell was even further adrift when the team retired his car due to the imminent threat of an engine failure.
Huge rear wings on the Mercedes cars created too much drag on the straights and put the tyres through too much pain in the corners, leading to higher degradation. As a result, they were only the sixth quickest team in Sao Paulo.
But Wolff knows there is more wrong with their cars than just the rear wings and is planning a total overhaul. He declared after the Interlagos race: "A lot of change [is needed]. We need a different car next year. And today proves that is the right thing to do.
"At least we know that the trajectory of changing is right. It feels horrible for the whole team. And I wish we could start the new season concentrating on the new car. There is something fundamentally wrong mechanically. It's not a rear wing and it's not the car being slightly too high. Because we are talking a millimetre or two.
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"That is performance but it is not the explanation for a total off-weekend. This car, the development of this car, has been more plasters we put on something not right, and it shows that it is so unpredictable that it can swing either side."
An upgrade introduced two weeks ago at the United States Grand Prix appeared to have made a big difference as Hamilton finished second in Austin, before being disqualified, and repeated the trick a week later in Mexico City – and that result was allowed to stand.
But everything fell apart again in Brazil with Mercedes much slower than everyone thought. The fact the Silver Arrows continue to have such big fluctuations in their performance leads Sky Sports F1 pundit Karun Chandhok to believe that the team is still clueless about what makes the W14s tick.
"I think [Hamilton] was only about 10 seconds away from being lapped, said the former HRT driver. "So yeah, I think there's a lot of head-scratching going on there. They need to understand as a collective group where the root of this problem is because they've had the highs of the last couple of races where they were quick. Let's not forget they were excluded in Austin.
"But you can't produce a world championship campaign and fight for the championship if you've got these ups and downs, with no clear understanding as to why. If you came to a track and said, 'We know we're going to struggle here, we know we're going to be weak here, we'll take it on the chin'.
"That's fine, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They seem to have no clear understanding of why the highs are the highs and the lows of the lows. And I think that is a worry going into next year."
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