(Motorsport) Formula 1 will begin pre-season testing for three days this week and many eyes will be on Mercedes following their poor 2023 season. The Silver Arrows won just one race last season while seven time World Champion Lewis Hamilton failed to get a single win for the first time in his career. The team have now redesigned their 2023 car W14 but have downplayed expectations, saying they were staying “humble” and playing “catch-up”. Team boss Toto Wolff has said that Mercedes will “eventually” have a fast enough car “to fight at the very front of the grid”.

Speaking ahead of pre-season testing, Toto Wolff said “So I was contemplating about that word for 15 minutes when we talked about the press release! Because on one side, you want to say we will be competitive. On the other side, you need to stay humble and realistic. So you could be saying, I hope that we will be competitive. And the midway roundhouse is, we will be competitive. We just don’t know when.

“And that was the ‘eventually’. I think we are on the slope that we wanted to be on in terms of our performance but then you don’t know where the other ones are. I think humility is most important. We’ve always tried to be humble, and especially after last year. We need to remind ourselves that we were quite far off for a long time in the season.”

Such was Red Bull’s dominance last season that they finished 244 points ahead of Mercedes, with the tally in itself being more than what seven teams managed throughout the last season. Technical director Mike Elliott said “We are under no illusions that it is going to be tough. We are starting behind and we are not the favourites.

“That is an unusual position for us to be in over the last 10 years, but we are focused on ourselves and working out how we do the best job we can.” Mercedes will now aim to reclaim their Constructors Standings in the 2023 season, having won it eight consecutive times.

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