2024 Mercedes-AMG | Petronas F1 Team

[venkyhere]

Where in any of this does he blame the team? he puts most of the blame on himself and reiterates that they havent just suddenly gotten dumb, they just dont understand the car, which is just factual.

"If you have any idea about who could turn this around i would happily listen to them"
-- that's the best pep talk that Allison and his team can get right now. A great motivation.
Of course the technical team is to blame, Toto is not an engineer. Everyone knows it. But dont say what you want to say in an internal meeting, out in the public, into the Piranha club media.

[KimiRai]

Blaming Lewis doesnt make any sense. If theres someone who has little fault its the drivers. Lewis is not comfortable with the car and George takes risks which can put him ahead at the moment but also has higher chance to shunt the car. Car needs to improve, Lewis would be able to drive more at the limit and Russell not take as many risks.

Toto did very well to put blame on himself rather than the team, that would have created serious instability. Laurent Rossi in 2023 made that mistake and it didnt end well.

[Emag]

Publicly, you should never blame anyone. It's a sign that a team is not operating well internally and people are frustrated. Which in Mercedes' case, that is fair and you can't put too much blame on it, considering it's the third year in a row when they seem clueless and lost.

I think how 2022 was handled acted as a catalyst for the next years. In my opinion, Mercedes was holding themselves to such high standards, it was considered unacceptable within the team not to have a championship-caliber car. Which is a wrong mentality to have when you start in the back foot.

We are winners, we are the best and we must be in that position at all times.

Those are words which you do not want to hear if you're in the technical team developing that car because it puts you under such immense pressure. They already saw that they were quite a step back when the season started in 2022. What you have to do at that point is to accept that the recovery will take time, so you allow the technical team to take a step back and regroup in order to reconsider their choices and evaluate their mistakes.

But that cringe "fan-dedicated letter" they issued gives us a hint that it wasn't really like that in the background. Basically everyone has been under immense pressure to get Mercedes to winning, and it's no surprise that they have suffered staff departures lately because the team is operated by humans after all. Nobody enjoys working on a downbeat and stressful environment.

A perfect example of a team bringing themselves out of an abysmal slump is McLaren and Zak Brown should take a lot of praise for that in my opinion.

I think Zak handled the situation at McLaren perfectly.
Of course, he snatched James Key back in 2020 because he believed he would be a great asset to the team. However, it turned out that he wasn't the right man to lead the technical team at McLaren and the way 2022 was handled by him did not click with Zak at all since he was so laid back about the lack of performance and marginal upgrade packages.

Nevertheless, he never made public statements undermining his team. It was only after Key got laid off and Stella's team got to work(which was actually comprised of people already within McLaren, just underutilized and wrongly managed by Key), that Zak made his voice public about wanting to make that change since France, 2022.

Mercedes on the other hand is constantly demanding results from their team changing neither the approach or the management / organization.

Toto might have played a big role in setting up the behemoth that Mercedes was in the early turbo-hybrid era, but equally, he should take responsibility for the slumps the team suffers as well.

[SiLo]

I think they are still trying to figure a lot of things out after probably losing many talented people to other teams, and also the cost cap likely cutting the total number of people that can work on the car. Eras come to an end and it's quite simply just that.

I think they will improve throughout the season. The flyaway races tend to be relatively similar as the teams don't bring upgrades and are still learning the car.

[CouncilorIrissa]

Merc will be much better next year without the negative energy and drama of Lewis.

I don't think Lewis's "negative energy" is the problem when the team's sim is telling them that they are 1 second faster than actual performance.

[Jdn1327]

Blaming Lewis doesnt make any sense. If theres someone who has little fault its the drivers. Lewis is not comfortable with the car and George takes risks which can put him ahead at the moment but also has higher chance to shunt the car. Car needs to improve, Lewis would be able to drive more at the limit and Russell not take as many risks.

Toto did very well to put blame on himself rather than the team, that would have created serious instability. Laurent Rossi in 2023 made that mistake and it didnt end well.

Lewis and George have been flattering the cars being produced, I think this car is a step too far for them to draw anything good from. W13 and 14 had their merits...this car is slow and unreliable. I feel really bad for George though...he has to stick this out and spit out the usual team rhetoric...I hope they can give him a better car next year.

[AMG.Tzan]

Lewis’s move to Ferrari looks more and more like a master stroke by the day…

Can’t believe what this team is doing this year! Is anyone going to blame Allison for this like they did with Elliot?? I don’t think so! And there’s no point in doing so cause there’s a wider problem inside Mercedes and this is the loss of quite good engineers over the years…

[Jurgen von Diaz]

Blaming Lewis doesnt make any sense. If theres someone who has little fault its the drivers. Lewis is not comfortable with the car and George takes risks which can put him ahead at the moment but also has higher chance to shunt the car. Car needs to improve, Lewis would be able to drive more at the limit and Russell not take as many risks.

Toto did very well to put blame on himself rather than the team, that would have created serious instability. Laurent Rossi in 2023 made that mistake and it didnt end well.

One reason why Lewis is leaving to Ferrari is that he and Merc had their disagreements about consept which way to go, Lewis said he knows what the car needs. Well now the car is made with listening Lewis, example the cockpit is further. Talk about car developement, Lewis's has had his time in the spotlight taking big role in public and it doesn't look so good.

But yeah the drivers are not the problem.

[Vanja #66]

It's funny reading Wolff's "we have a physics problem, in the past we always understood the car and now we don't" and not laugh while remembering 2017/18 seasons and constant moaning about having a "diva"

Allison's statement from around preseason testing was very telling, going along the lines of "before we could do an upgrade and it always adds performance (downforce) and now with these cars we can't do it like that" It just confirms their aero development was basically "add winglets, strakes, wing level etc and it will go faster" because of PU supremacy. Even in 2021 this still held true.

It does not seem they bothered too much with checking how the car would behave in (as many as needed) challenging conditions on track, they could just take away or add a bit of wing front or rear to balance the car and just went for it... This level of incompetence is shocking, honestly. To think this team secured 8 consecutive WCCs...

[zibby43]

It's funny reading Wolff's "we have a physics problem, in the past we always understood the car and now we don't" and not laugh while remembering 2017/18 seasons and constant moaning about having a "diva"

Allison's statement from around preseason testing was very telling, going along the lines of "before we could do an upgrade and it always adds performance (downforce) and now with these cars we can't do it like that" It just confirms their aero development was basically "add winglets, strakes, wing level etc and it will go faster" because of PU supremacy. Even in 2021 this still held true.

It does not seem they bothered too much with checking how the car would behave in (as many as needed) challenging conditions on track, they could just take away or add a bit of wing front or rear to balance the car and just went for it... This level of incompetence is shocking, honestly. To think this team secured 8 consecutive WCCs...

I think you’re vastly oversimplifying the reasons behind their past success and comparing the two regulation sets is like comparing apples to oranges.

Also think there’s a bit of revisionist history going on regarding the PU in 2021.

[Mtshali_Motorsport]

It's funny reading Wolff's "we have a physics problem, in the past we always understood the car and now we don't" and not laugh while remembering 2017/18 seasons and constant moaning about having a "diva"

Allison's statement from around preseason testing was very telling, going along the lines of "before we could do an upgrade and it always adds performance (downforce) and now with these cars we can't do it like that" It just confirms their aero development was basically "add winglets, strakes, wing level etc and it will go faster" because of PU supremacy. Even in 2021 this still held true.

It does not seem they bothered too much with checking how the car would behave in (as many as needed) challenging conditions on track, they could just take away or add a bit of wing front or rear to balance the car and just went for it... This level of incompetence is shocking, honestly. To think this team secured 8 consecutive WCCs...

That bold statement highlighted by Vanja pretty much summarized Mercedes tenure of domination since 2014 to 2021

Because of the baked in advantage of the PU they were able to get away with ‘top downforce’ (high downforce- high drag). Hence why majority of not all of the cars suffered in dirty air and predominantly needed clean air to be quick.

On the contrary RedBull had to heavily rely on aero (predominantly underbody) to compensate for the PU deficit, could be the reason why they utilized the high-rake concept which I feel payed massive dividends in added knowledge to the ground effect regulations.

Also makes sense why Mercedes (and Aston Martin) were hampered with the cut out of the floor in 2021.

Funny how this team was built on the success of Brawn GP, who so happened to build a car that had high underbody downforce (double diffuser loophole).

[maygun]

Where in any of this does he blame the team? he puts most of the blame on himself and reiterates that they havent just suddenly gotten dumb, they just dont understand the car, which is just factual.

"If you have any idea about who could turn this around i would happily listen to them"
-- that's the best pep talk that Allison and his team can get right now. A great motivation.
Of course the technical team is to blame, Toto is not an engineer. Everyone knows it. But dont say what you want to say in an internal meeting, out in the public, into the Piranha club media.

any have Toto's email address?

[NoDivergence]

It's funny reading Wolff's "we have a physics problem, in the past we always understood the car and now we don't" and not laugh while remembering 2017/18 seasons and constant moaning about having a "diva"

Allison's statement from around preseason testing was very telling, going along the lines of "before we could do an upgrade and it always adds performance (downforce) and now with these cars we can't do it like that" It just confirms their aero development was basically "add winglets, strakes, wing level etc and it will go faster" because of PU supremacy. Even in 2021 this still held true.

It does not seem they bothered too much with checking how the car would behave in (as many as needed) challenging conditions on track, they could just take away or add a bit of wing front or rear to balance the car and just went for it... This level of incompetence is shocking, honestly. To think this team secured 8 consecutive WCCs...

That's some of the biggest revisionist bullshit I've read in a long time

[SKYnRacing24]

This team is in a crisis and the fact its not talked about as the main talking point in this thread is crazy. Toto Wolf should be on the chopping board, Brain drain. A complete turd of a car and ontop of that its unreliable. Lewis's worse start since 2009 and the teams worse start since 2010. Wow

[Xyz22]

It's funny reading Wolff's "we have a physics problem, in the past we always understood the car and now we don't" and not laugh while remembering 2017/18 seasons and constant moaning about having a "diva"

Allison's statement from around preseason testing was very telling, going along the lines of "before we could do an upgrade and it always adds performance (downforce) and now with these cars we can't do it like that" It just confirms their aero development was basically "add winglets, strakes, wing level etc and it will go faster" because of PU supremacy. Even in 2021 this still held true.

It does not seem they bothered too much with checking how the car would behave in (as many as needed) challenging conditions on track, they could just take away or add a bit of wing front or rear to balance the car and just went for it... This level of incompetence is shocking, honestly. To think this team secured 8 consecutive WCCs...

Don't think this is entirely fair, Vanja. For sure thanks to their superior PU they had an easier job compared to the others, but they were also spending more money than everyone at the time, and they can't do that any more due to the BC. Moreover, they also lost a huge amount of talents in the last few years.

It's just a different team right now.