Toto Wolff has insisted it would be fundamentally wrong if Formula One was to attempt to peg back Max Verstappen and Red Bull as a reaction to the dominance they have displayed this season.
Verstappen won the Monaco Grand Prix comfortably on Sunday from Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso and Alpine’s Esteban Ocon. For two-thirds of the race he was in complete control at the front of the field in the dry and then when heavy rain created late drama he and Red Bull had the mastery of the conditions in the wet as well.
Verstappen now has a 39-point lead over his teammate Sergio Pérez in the championship after only six meetings. Red Bull have yet to be beaten this season and have demonstrated a mastery across every type of circuit and in all conditions. A potential record-breaking clean sweep of wins is already being suggested, even across a 22-race season.
Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton and George Russell finished fourth and fifth respectively at Monaco, in the first competitive outing for the new upgrades the team are hoping will turn round the performance of their car this year, but they remained in a different league from Red Bull. Wolff, however, who was at the helm as Mercedes scored eight consecutive team and seven drivers’ titles between 2014 and 2021, believes that F1 should not make any changes that would artificially constrain Red Bull.
“F1 is a meritocracy,” said the Mercedes team principal. “It’s sport, whether it is good for the show or not. Obviously a strong fight between 10 drivers or at least two, is much better for all of us but it is not happening, that is why you have to just accept that and work to get back there.”
He went on to acknowledge that Verstappen and Red Bull were simply performing at their best, exemplified by the world champion’s race in Monaco where he pushed to the limit but crucially kept his car on the island on a treacherous track that caught out many other drivers.
“They have just done a good job,” he added. “The car is fast in all conditions, the driver is at the top of his game, even on Sunday going off at times but to not DNF is a skill. You can see that he pushed, so all credit to them. We just need to do a better job, we need to catch up, find intelligent solutions. Hope that our learning slope, our development slope is steeper than theirs and eventually fight for this again.”
Red Bull’s team principal, Christian Horner, however played down their chances of a clean sweep this season after Monaco. “There’s so much jeopardy,” he said. “You saw on Sunday with the weather and there’s so many factors that can go wrong and the competition is so strong, that, you know anything can happen. So we’re just taking one race at a time.”
Wolff dismissed suggestions that Red Bull’s superiority should be addressed by F1 by potentially offering in-season advantages such as additional testing to other teams but in doing so could not resist making passing reference to Red Bull breaking the budget cap in 2022.
“If we start putting in a balance of performance we will ruin this sport,” he said. “The best driver in the best car, spending the same amount of money should win the championship and if you break the rules in either you should be heavily penalised but only then. Not for doing a good job.”
Although the Monaco circuit was far from ideal for testing their new design concept, the team seem satisfied with the early feedback from their change of aerodynamic philosophy and are hoping for a more comprehensive assessment at the following round in Spain next weekend.
“We need to go to Barcelona, collect more data,” said Wolff. “It’s a new baseline, I don’t expect to clear a margin on Aston Martin and Ferrari there but it’s more of an understanding on what this car does now. How we set it up. We are really good at grinding away in a development direction. Monaco is low-speed and downforce and you don’t see that on many other tracks. We are coming to more mid- and high-speed corners, a proper racetrack so it should be good.”
