The German manufacturer endured a difficult F1 season-opener in Bahrain last weekend, with its W14 proving much slower compared to rivals than it had anticipated.
The gap to pace-setter Red Bull is immense and, having been leap-frogged by customer team Aston Martin, Wolff has already conceded that the current Mercedes concept is not going to be good enough to be developed into a title winner.
While that points to a new direction for 2024 and beyond, Mercedes still needs to address what it can achieve this season.
And while a lot of work has been devoted to improvements to the W14, with a sidepod revamp coming for around the time of the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix at Imola, Wolff has indicated the team may need to change paths completely.
With cost cap limits meaning there is not the luxury to run parallel programmes of improving the W14 and working on a new B-spec concept for later this campaign, Wolff says the team needs to choose one or the other direction.
Asked about the difficulties of developing an all-new design under the cost cap, Wolff said: “It is extremely difficult to catch up such an advantage, but it is what we have to do. We have no choice.
“I am not sure the budget cap gives you constraints in the position where we are, but we do need to decide which direction we are going in and put all the resources behind it. We are still developing one car. The question is just which car.”
With the Imola upgrade expected to bring only two or three tenths of a second, Wolff already knows that it is not going to be enough to get Mercedes to the front of the grid.
This is why he is adamant that bold decisions need to be made straight away rather than delaying things any further.
“We will tackle it straight away because, when you look at where we were at the end of the season, where it seemed like we caught up a lot and it was just a matter of which circuits suited us and which not, it seems like we almost doubled if not tripled the gap to Red Bull,” he said. “This is what we need to look at.
“Everything in between - the Ferrari, the Aston - that’s just a sideshow. Having said that, what Aston Martin was able to achieve is a good inspiration because they came back from two seconds off the pace to being second-quickest team. And with us everything is bad.
“The single-lap pace is still good but in the race we saw the consequences. To put it bluntly, we are lacking downforce, sliding the tyres and going backwards.”
Wolff said that both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell understood the scale of response that Mercedes needed to make, and the potential there was for some short-term sacrifices to be made.
“The drivers are fully aware,” he said. “We are speaking about it openly in the whole team. Everyone is aware, this is not a matter of finding 0.3 seconds and polishing the car up.
“This is a matter of serious performance we need to find to put us back in a position to fight for race wins and championships.”
