Toto Wolff isn’t satisfied with Mercedes’ early 2025 performance, claiming their W16 car simply “isn’t doing enough right now.”
The German team has struggled to compete at the front since 2021, when their bold “sidepodless” design experiment backfired and left them playing catch-up for several seasons. Despite grabbing a few race wins in 2024 that suggested they might be turning things around, Wolff clearly expected more progress by now.
There have been some bright spots. George Russell managed a solid P3 finish at the season opener in Australia, while rookie teammate Andrea Kimi Antonelli impressed with P4 in his Formula 1 debut.
But that’s not enough for Wolff.
“It’s not doing enough at the moment,” the Austrian CEO told reporters including GPblog in Melbourne. “But you can see at least it’s become more predictable and we understand the car better.”
The team has made some genuine improvements over last year’s troublesome car.
“We have the car’s balance now, which the previous one didn’t have,” Wolff explained. “And from there on, it’s pretty clear what we have to do to extract more performance.”
Mercedes seems to have closed the gap somewhat to the frontrunners, at least according to their team boss.
“On a single lap, we look solid, and I think that the gap is much closer, and on the long runs or race performances too. We just need to understand that,” he concluded.
The question now is whether Mercedes can accelerate their development and truly challenge for wins again, or if 2025 will be another season of playing catch-up to their rivals.
