Racing Point is starting to look less and less like a team that can do that.

The purpose of copying the Merc wasn't to win in it, it was to free their engineers this season so they could focus totally on the 2021 regulation changes but the team still get a decent result. Get early good finishes, then coast to 5th in the WCC. The delay in the regulations has highlighted their copying, otherwise by this time of the year nobody would have even been mentioning it other than to point out their performance drop off, and they'll also probably just copy again next year, but they literally can't copy for 2022 (without using private date from Mercedes), so their plans never could have been to win with a copy.