Toto Wolff has revealed that Mercedes will be making "fundamental" changes to their car design for next season, but are on track to remain under the cost cap.
The Silver Arrows have suffered a downturn in performance since F1 underwent a major rules change last year, winning just one race in that time. They have consistently scored podiums though, with Lewis Hamilton claiming third place at the Canadian Grand Prix last Sunday.
Despite that though, team principal Wolff is exploring radical ways the German team can improve for next year. Mercedes will have to stay under the sport's £105.6million cost cap though, which gives teams less flexibility to make major developments.
But the Silver Arrows boss is confident that his team will have no problem staying under the cap to make the changes they want for next year's car. He insisted that they are consistently keeping within the rules.
"We have set up a huge organisation in our financial department of 46 people, that monitors the cost cap down to the last screw. We look at that trend of our spend during all of the year and what we've done is basically allocate resource to various projects," he said.
"We've stayed below that line all year last year, and we're still below that line this year and that is considering a normal development switch for next year. This is still pretty much on track. The good thing is that we are constantly learning about what the car is doing.
"There are going to be some fundamental design changes for next year, but it's not that we're building stuff. It's more like what are we simulating? That is not measured in money, or teraflops or wind tunnel hours."
HAVE YOUR SAY! Will Mercedes win a race this season? Comment below.
Though "fundamental" changes are on the horizon for next season, Hamilton has been pleased by the team's improvements this campaign. Following his podium finish in Montreal, the Englishman insisted that the progress was clear.
“It’s honestly been a great weekend for us – we are slowly chipping away. The Astons took a little bit of a step this weekend when they added the upgrades, but we are working on bringing some more moving forwards," he said.
“To just have this consistency and be up on the podium here in Montreal, which is such an incredible city, and we’ve got such a great crowd here every year without fail, so a big, big thank you to everyone here.”
“Firstly [it’s] quite an honour to be up there with two world champions. I was really excited to be third and just try to be in that mix, but unfortunately, we just didn’t have the pace today. We knew this weekend, this wouldn’t be our strongest circuit.
"We struggle in the lower speed corners particularly, and that’s really where I was losing to Fernando and Max, just on traction out of Turn 2, and pretty much every corner. But we’ve got a lot of work to do to just add rear downforce to the car, and a little bit more efficiency.
"But we are chipping away. I do believe we will get there at some stage. Max was a little bit gone, but I think our pace was a little bit closer today, so we are going in the right direction.”
READ MORE:
