Toto Wolff gives Lewis Hamilton one reason to hope he can beat F1 rival Max Verstappen

Lewis Hamilton has spent the last two season living in Max Verstappen’s shadow with Mercedes unable to give him a car capable of beating their Red Bull F1 rivals

Lewis Hamilton has lived in Max Verstappen’s shadow for the last two seasons (

Neither Lewis Hamilton nor George Russell won a race in 2023. And the former has now gone more than two years without a victory since losing the 2021 title race to Max Verstappen.

In contrast, the Dutchman and his team were almost entirely dominant this year with Carlos Sainz being the only non-Red Bull racer to win a Grand Prix. So huge was their lead even by the summer break, the champions were able to switch focus to their 2024 car development much earlier than any of their rivals.

That does not bode well for any other team’s chances of closing the gap in the next 12 months. But Mercedes team principal Wolff still has a reason to believe it can be done.

“You have the laws of diminishing returns, your development or performance curve flattens – that is clear,” he told reporters. “The more mature the regulations are, the more you can extract.

“Maybe our development curve is steeper because we are behind, but that is industrial theory. Whether you can apply it to the world of sports, I’m not quite sure. It’s good engineering – [Red Bull’s] engineering team has just done a good job. They came out of the blocks, for whatever reason, much better than everybody else and they have a driver who is on top of his game.”

Wolff’s theory is that Red Bull are closer to the ceiling of what can be achieved in terms of car performance from the current set of design regulations. Mercedes, who made the wrong aerodynamic choices when the current ruleset was first introduced, have more improvements to make in that regard.