Mercedes will not “cry foul” over Red Bull’s domination of the 2023 season despite suffering due to past rules changes, says team principal Toto Wolff.
Red Bull has achieved an unprecedented level of success over the 2023 season so far. The team has won all 14 Grand Prix and is on a 15-race run of consecutive wins stretching back to last year. Max Verstappen set a new record with his 10th consecutive win last weekend.
Wolf believes some past regulation changes were introduced to break Mercedes’ domination of F1, such as in 2020 when his team swept both championships for the seventh year in a row.
“I think we probably lost the 2021 drivers’ championship for many reasons,” he said. “One was the final race.
“But we also lost it because those regulations were set in place in order to reduce the advantage that we had. 2020 was a super-dominant year for us. I think it was the best car we’ve ever had. It was the best car we’ve ever had. And then towards the end of the season they changed the regs by cutting the floor out.
“That was to stop us, and we could see the results in 2021, we were not as competitive as Red Bull was. But in Silverstone we unlocked more of the potential of the car and got ourselves back into the championship. But back in the day, these regs were clearly targeted to re-establish the pecking order.”
Formula 1’s owners Liberty Media aimed to create closer competition between teams with the budget cap it introduced in 2021 and revised technical regulations the following year. Wolff does not believe further changes should be hurried in to halt Red Bull, who have won all bar one of the 21 grands prix held in the last 12 months.
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“As a team principal, I don’t want to jump on the bandwagon that others have done in the past of saying we need to change the regulations because we can’t continue with the dominance of a team,” he said. “If a team dominates in the way Max has done with Red Bull, than fair dos.
“This is a meritocracy. As long as you comply to the regulations, technical, sporting and financial, we just need to say ‘well done’.
“It’s up to us to catch up. And if that takes a long time, then it takes a long time. I remember people crying foul when it was us. Entertainment follows sport, not the other way around. We can’t be WWE and just scripted content. We don’t want to be scripted content.”
Red Bull’s other rivals have also spoken out against introducing rules such as the Balance of Performance used in the World Endurance Championship to equalise the competitiveness of different car designs.
Frederic Vasseur, team principal of Ferrari which also competes in the WEC, said he’s “not a big fan of the balance of performance or any kind of artifice like this.
“It’s not the DNA at all of Formula 1. And on the top, we have already the wind tunnel allocation, with a kind of balance – not a balance of performance, but balance of allocation and it’s enough.”
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McLaren team principal Andrea Stella agreed they “don’t want to have any help” to get on terms with Red Bull. “We want to close the gap by our own means. We like this challenge and that’s what we want for the next couple of years.”
Red Bull expect their rivals will gain on them despite the absence of any significant rules changes before 2026.
“The regulations are pretty stable. We have three sets of regulations now: Technical, Sporting and Financial. The Technical and Sporting playing fields seem to be reasonably content. The Financial one, there seems to be a little bit of manoeuvring now and again on.
“But I think that regulations are stable for the next couple of years. And we fully expect our competitors – I mean, look at the jump that McLaren made recently. We fully expect there to be convergence, even this year, before we head into 2024.
“I’m not aware of any draconian, significant regulation changes in the pipeline. We have that already for 2026, which will be a complete reset. Despite the fact that we’ve done a lot of winning this year, a lot of the races, including the last race, [have been] pretty entertaining.”
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