Budget ceilings have not affected us, believes Wolff. Mercedes is looking elsewhere for reasons why it struggled

After winning eight straight Constructors’ Cups, Mercedes entered the season with a car far slower than Ferrari and Red Bull. Despite making considerable progress during the season, the British stable failed to get back to the top. For what reasons?

The team from Brackley struggled with aerodynamic bouncing of the monopost at the start of the year, causing them to lose speed on the straights and stability in the corners.

Lewis Hamilton, in particular, complained about the very poor handling of his car in the first races of the new year.

Later, it became clear that the Mercedes’ problem was all in the floor. And it seems he hasn’t been able to fix this design flaw over the course of the season, at least not completely.

However, Toto Wolff, the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team boss, believes his stable was not hampered by the budget cap. According to recent reports, the problems were so deep-seated that more money would have made little difference.

Even so, the W13’s performance improved significantly over the course of the year. In the second half of the season, Mercedes was rapidly catching Ferrari for second place in the Constructors’ Cup. But even George Russell’s triumph in the São Paulo VC was not enough to secure second place overall.

The talented British driver’s performance at least extended his streak of 11 consecutive seasons with a race win.

Statement from the Mercedes boss

“We are not short of capable people or the right tools. But we had to peel back layer by layer to get to the heart of the problem. Removing the budget caps wouldn’t have changed anything,” Wolff explained on the Beyond the Grid podcast.

“We believe we’ve solved all the fundamental problems with the hopping, but we couldn’t solve them all on this year’s bandwagon. Next year it will be easier, we are changing part of the construction and layout of the monocoque, that should be a step in the right direction,” explained the Mercedes boss.

“But with the new regulations, sometimes when you solve one problem you find that it was caused by another problem. So we have to stay humble and not think that we will be back in the title fight right away,” Wolff added.

F1, Beyond the Grid