Mercedes thinks it will need '6 to 12 months' to catch up with Red Bull

Mercedes does not believe it will be able to beat Red Bull Racing in the 2023 Formula 1 season. A more realistic goal, according to Toto Wolff, is to win a race by the end of the season, as George Russell did at the 2022 Sao Paulo Grand Prix.

Like last year, Mercedes has quite a bit of catching up to do. Wolff hopes that Russell or Lewis Hamilton will be able to win a race by the end of the season, but stresses that wanting to beat Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez is 'not realistic' at the moment.

Wolff: 'Not realistic to want to beat Red Bull'

"We’re just two races in this year, but is it realistic when we look at the gaps? No, it’s not," Wolff said in conversation with Motorsport.com. Meanwhile, the Mercedes team boss has already indicated that the W14 will undergo drastic changes. In doing so, he even hinted that the car could well resemble Adrian Newey's design, something the team previously denied.

The 51-year-old Austrian stressed that his team finally managed to win a race in 2022 and moved closer. According to him, the aim should therefore be to achieve the same in 2023. However, given the current pace of the RB19, which is running more or less a second a lap away from the W14, Wolff does think it could take some time to close the gap.

"I think the length is probably between six and 12 months, because that’s the time that it really took for us [last year] to figure out what was actually happening with the car," concludes the Mercedes boss. He expects that over time, the gap to Red Bull Racing should logically narrow, as Mercedes' development pace is faster while it is still working towards a better-performing concept.