Mercedes’ spell of dominance in Formula 1 brought more to the sport because there was a close competition between its drivers, team principal Toto Wolff has claimed.
His team’s drivers won every championship from 2014 to 2020. All bar one of those titles was taken by Lewis Hamilton, but the 2014 and 2016 contests were decided in final-race showdowns between him and team mate Nico Rosberg.
At the halfway point this season, Max Verstappen has won all bar two of the 11 grands prix and leads the championship with 281 points to team mate Sergio Perez’s 171. Red Bull have more than twice as many points as their closest rival.
While Mercedes regularly won the constructors championship by huge margins in the mid-2010s, Wolff said the contest between their drivers made those seasons more entertaining than today.
“I don’t know whether our dominance was similar or less [than Red Bull’s],” he told media including RaceFans yesterday. “I think we had years where we did it in the same way.
“But at least we had two cars that were fighting each other so that caused a little bit of entertainment for everyone. And that’s not the case at the moment.”
Mercedes is the only team besides Red Bull to have won a race in the last 12 months. However following George Russell’s victory at Interlagos in the penultimate race of last season, Mercedes dropped far back from their rivals during the winter.
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Wolff admitted the scale of Red Bull’s margin over the competition had taken them by surprise. “I often say that it’s a meritocracy and it’s up to us to fight back. Did we expect that gap? Certainly not.
“I think with the last step of upgrade it seem they have another advantage that they were able to exploit. But again it always gets me back to the point of we’ve just got to dig in and and do the best possible job.”
Red Bull scored their 12th consecutive grand prix victory in Hungary last week. That broke the record set by McLaren in 1988, when the team had its famed all-star line-up of Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said Verstappen, who is on course to win his third world championship this year, deserves to be regarded on the same level as that pair. “It’s so difficult to compare drivers from different generations but Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, both legends of the sport and I think Max is rapidly joining that group.”
However pairing two drivers of that calibre brings challenges, said Horner, noting Senna and Prost “got pretty sparky between the two of them” before the latter left McLaren the following year.
“Two alphas is always a difficult one to manage,” he added.
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