Toto Wolff discusses idea of Mercedes reverting to previous W13 version

Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff has said that he will not rule out the team going back to an old spec of their car if that is the right thing to do.

The W13 has proven a real problem child at times for the Silver Arrows, with it throwing up more issues in the first couple of months of the campaign than nearly all of its predecessors and certainly more than the ones in the turbo-hybrid era which has been so favourable towards Mercedes.

Indeed, the porpoising issue that the car has had has given George Russell and Lewis Hamilton plenty to contend with so far this year, and that has also hampered lap time with them unable to set the car up how they would wish.

P5 and P6 in Miami was a decent enough result for the team, though it’s obviously not where they want to be, though, and we now head to Spain where they’ll be itching to try and get more good points.

The Barcelona circuit is the perfect yardstick to compare the car as it is now to the one that they ran in winter testing, too, with the W13 boasting bigger sidepods back then and having a different configuration.

Indeed, after Miami it was put to Wolff that if the Mercedes looked slower in Spain now than it did then, would he and the team consider going back towards that older spec, and this is what he had to say:

“Well I wouldn’t discount anything, but we need to give all our people benefit of the doubt,” Wolff was quoted by Autosport.

“They have produced great race cars in the past and we believe that this is the route to go. Barcelona is definitely going to be a point in time where we are able to correlate with what we saw in February and gather more data.

“I’m also annoyed about saying the same thing about gathering data and making experiments, but it’s physics