bananapeel23 wrote: ↑02 Sep 2024, 14:01
Mercedes almost snatched P2 in the WCC in 2022 and ended up P2 in the WCC in 2023, with Hamilton P3 in the WDC. Mercedes have 3 race wins and several pole positions to their name in 2024. Mercedes is still a top team, and expecting the team principal to stop down after 3 decent seasons is quite ridiculous, especially after he led them to 8 straight WCCs and 7 straight WDCs.
They were never close to P2 in 22, no matter how hard Binotto tried not to take it
They ended up P2 in 23 after the worst unsporting move in Vegas after Crashgate 2008 (pushing to penalise Sainz after drain cover PU damage) and still finished with more than 100p less than previous year
Now they are stuck in 4th place, will take a miracle to get higher up and will need some luck to equal 23 points tally (based on last couple of races)
On the other side, his contribution to 15 titles in total is marginal. Brawn built up the early team (Schumi, Costa, Bell, Serra, Lowe, Geoff Willis, etc) and pointed Brixworth towards pushing like mad on 2014 PU before anyone else started thinking about hybrids. Lauda was taking care of drivers and did a decent job all in all. Wolff bought his way in and put himself as CEO and TP and basically took all the glory
214270 wrote: ↑02 Sep 2024, 14:39
You do realise in less than 12 months it’s not completely inconceivable Merc become the benchmark platform?
For that to happen, they will first need to trully understand what the car does and why. The only package that worked like they wanted it to is Monaco FW and subsequent floor update, meaning either 3/4 or 4/5 floor packages didn't work as they expected. They often put too much emphasis on Q and eat through their tyres in the race and it only worked on few completely cold weekends. You can't fake the entire season like that and points tally always tells the true story of the season