Mercedes make a statement: 'We are going to prove them wrong'
F1 News
- GPblog.com
After eight years of dominance, the past two years have been tough for the Mercedes team. After changes to the technical regulations in 2022, they managed to win just one race in the past two seasons. With the return of James Allison as technical director in April last year, a new hope has emerged for the upcoming season at the team.
Team boss Toto Wolff confirmed some time ago that everything about the team's new car is different. With this, the team hope to return to consistently racing at the front of the field. The official date the team will present the W15 is still unknown, but rumours suggest it will happen on 14 February.
Mercedes needs to start proving critics wrong
In the Performance People podcast, Allison says the motivation to fight back next season is high. "There's a sense that we're all in this together and that people have sort of written our future for us – the once great team now in decline – and all of the negative narrative that comes around with that. “As long as internally we're saying, ‘Well, let them say that, because that's their job, they've got to say something'. Our job is to show them they're wrong, and imagine how good that's going to feel when they've all been looking sympathetically at us, and with faux sympathy, in our direction. We just suck that up and go, ‘Okay, right, we're going to work on this, we're going to come back, and we're going to show them'."
Allison has confidence in the Mercedes team
"This is a place full of extraordinary talent who have got absolutely everything they need in their head, their character and the equipment we have at the factory to be resilient to this and show that we can rebuild and produce the car that is deservedly at the front once more. Much as maybe the outside world might imagine this is deeply painful internally, and on one level it is, it's also really exciting. A lot of whether it's depressing or exciting is how you choose to look at it.”