>>150305792
>who do the rumours benefit
>i wonder who started these rumours
Even the teams don't know if they have a good car yet, many times at regulation changes in the past teams have thought they've had excellent packages only to be hopelessly behind, this is because it doesn't matter where you think you are relative to an abstract reference you've created for a target, the only reference you should be paying attention to relative to your own performance is the performance of the other teams, who go into extreme measures to obfuscate their own data.
When more than half the teams themselves don't know whether they have a good car, how can anyone (especially some random reporter) know the comparative competitiveness of the teams before the first open testing occurs in 2026.
Reporters lie by second nature in order to stir up the sweet melodrama that they feed on, surely everyone knows this.

Toto internally knows he had nothing to do with creating mercs success in 2014, Brawn got the team into a decent shape, and F1's politics gave them their engine advantage.
Toto has been humbled in recent years, so perhaps he himself doubts whether merc were ever good enough to have earned the 2014 advantage on merit, and the utter failure in recent years of merc as a whole, especially their aero department may make him place his hope on another dominant engine rather than a well balanced team all around.

The thing is that creating a dominant engine is alot easier said than done, and merc may fall flat on their face when they expect their engine department to bail them out of trouble again.
Going too aggressive with their aero may lead to shit shows like 2022, yet going too cautious will also certainly lead to a sub-optimal outcome.
If they focus everything on the engine in doing so neglecting their aero and then the gap in engine performance fails to materialize, they may end up the 3rd-4th fastest team again.