Mercedes confident it can upgrade without overspending

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff is confident that the squad will be able to continue pressing on with its upgrade packages as well as its development of next year's car without inadvertently breaching F1's cost cap along the way.

The team made significant progress with new parts introduced in Monaco and Montreal, and is planning to add more upgrades in time for Austria and the British GP at the start of July.

But all this spending has to be balanced against work on next year's car or else they risk falling behind again in 2024. That's not an easy balancing act given the strict limits on team spending.

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But Wolff is confident that they have things in hand and won't run the risk of overspending and being hit with penalties, as happened to rival team Red Bull last year.

"We have set up a huge organisation in our financial department of 46 people that monitors the cost cap down to the last screw," he told the media last week.

"It follows the trend of spending during all of the year, and what we've done is basically allocated resource to various projects," he explained. "We stayed below that line all year last year, and we've stayed below that line this year.

"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," he added. "But it's not that we're building stuff. It's more what are we simulating, and that is not measured in money. It's teraflops and wind tunnel hours."

Although the team has made progress with its recent upgrades, there's no question that there is more ground to recover before they will be competing for race wins and championships like the old days.

Red Bull's Max Verstappen was streets ahead of the rest last week in Montreal, while Lewis Hamilton succeeded in passing Fernando Alonso at the start only to prove unable to prevent the Aston Martin sweeping past him in the second stint.

"We struggle in the lower-speed corners particularly, and that's really where I was losing to Fernando and to Max," Hamilton reported after the end of last week's race, citing lack of traction "out of pretty much every corner".

"We've got a lot of work to do just to add rear downforce to the car and a little bit more efficiency but we're chipping away."

Despite the upgrades, Hamilton said that the current W14 "doesn't feel a huge difference to the beginning of the year."

"The characteristics of the car are very, very similar to what we had earlier on in the year," he said. "There are some elements of the car which do feel different, but it's just simply having a little bit more downforce on the car.

"It's definitely not characteristic-wise the car that's going to be able to beat the Red Bull just yet, so we've got to work on that," he added. "For next year's car we need to take a lot of these different things off and change them."

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