After a disappointing season-opening qualifying in Bahrain, with George Russell and Lewis Hamilton qualifying sixth and seventh, Wolff said the reality of his team’s lack of performance had hit home.
The team continued to use the same car design as last year, while many rivals switched to the Red Bull solution, and Wolff said it was time to admit that his team had been wrong.
After launching his new W14 with the belief that it could eventually become a winner, Wolff said his tune had changed and it was time to pursue other options.
And when asked if he agreed with Hamilton’s assessment earlier in the weekend that Mercedes would not achieve its goals with the current design, Wolff said, “I don’t think this package is going to be competitive in the long run.
“We’ve given our best all winter, and now we just need to regroup and sit down with the engineers, who are absolutely not dogmatic about anything.
“There are no sacred cows and we need to decide what development direction we want to go in, in order to be competitive and win races.
“It’s not like last year, where you score a lot of podiums and you end up getting there.
“I’m sure we can win races this season. But it’s really the medium and long term that we have to look at, and what decisions we have to make.”
Wolff suggested that a thorough analysis of Mercedes’ long-term plan should be done after this weekend’s Bahrain GP.
But he was clear that even if the team chose to pursue an entirely new concept, it would not give up trying to move forward as much as it can with the W14.
“We’re racers, and we’re in the race, and we’re never going to give up fighting in every session to be on top,” he said.
“If you look at the hierarchy today, you say, well, that’s not realistic. But I look at what can we come up with next week? What can we add to the car? What is the change in direction that we can implement? And how quickly, so we can maybe turn things around this year?
“This is the first qualifying of the year 23. That’s why I don’t want to rule anything out for this year, while being totally realistic about the fact that it [the car] needs to change a lot. “
