After the disappointment of the W13 and W14 concepts, Mercedes is pursuing an all-new car design for 2024 in a bid to turn around its competitiveness and return to the front of the F1 grid.
Wolff admitted Mercedes have a “huge mountain to climb” if they are to be on par with current F1 leaders Red Bull by next season, but remains optimistic.
“To get the expectations right because we have a big mountain to climb,” Wolff said in the Mercedes video. “We have a very successful team and we have a big gap that we have to close.
“At the same time, I believe we have taken active steps to close that gap. Will it be good enough? I don’t know. But we will see that in testing and in the first race” in Bahrain.
“I’m very excited. I want to start now. The stopwatch will tell me what kind of work we’ve done.”
Wolff stressed that Mercedes had “learned a lot” through a difficult 2023 season, which was the German manufacturer’s first winless F1 season since 2011.
“The difficult races and seasons are where you learn the most,” Wolff added.
“And we always say, the days we lose are the days our competitors regret, because we learn the most. The lessons we learn as an organization, as humans. I think there are a lot of them, but technically that will be beneficial going forward,” said the forward.
“This year we noticed that the car was not operating as consistently as we expected.
“That’s probably because we didn’t develop it in the time frame we needed. It was clear that the interaction between the chassis and the tires wasn’t working perfectly. So in that respect, this was the most important learning. .”