Coulthard on Wolff’s ‘brutal’ W14 verdict: “A big kick in the whatnots"
Mercedes opted to persist with their radical ‘zero pod’ approach this season instead of following the grid’s convergence to a sidepod concept similar to Red Bull’s.
But before the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix had even taken place, Wolff admitted Mercedes will have to abandon their design and come up with something new in order to get back to winning ways in F1.
“I think it was brutal,” Coulthard, who is a Red Bull ambassador, told Channel 4 after the season opener.
“This car has only been alive for six days, a few days of testing, three days here. I don’t know where he’s coming from with that.
“But yeah, they’ve got a completely different strategy with the sidepods. They clearly have to try and follow the pack now. But that is like a big kick in the whatnots for [the] design team.”
Lewis Hamilton took fifth in Bahrain but finished almost a minute behind Max Verstappen’s dominant Red Bull, while he was also beaten by Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin - which uses the same Mercedes power unit as the W14.
It followed a disappointing qualifying in which Hamilton and teammate George Russell ended up over six-tenths adrift of Verstappen in one-lap pace, which led to Wolff agreeing with Hamilton’s damning assessment of the W14.
"I don't think that this package is going to be competitive eventually,” he conceded.
"We gave it our best go over the winter and now we all just need to regroup, sit down with the engineers, be totally non-dogmatic and ask what is the development direction we want to pursue in order to be able to win races.
"We hit our targets. That's why I say we gave it our best shot. But the moment comes when the stopwatch comes out and that showed us that we are not good enough.
"At this team we blame the problem not the person. I have responsibilities. I need to fire myself if I want to do something.
"We got it wrong last year. We thought we could fix it by sticking to the concept of car but it didn't work out. So we just need to switch our focus on to what we believe is the right direction."
