Toto Wolff insists he will not follow Christian Horner’s blueprint of complaining to the FIA about a dominant rival despite Mercedes struggling to catch Red Bull. Back in 2015, Red Bull team principal Horner asked Formula One’s governing body to step in after several one-two finishes for Lewis Hamilton and his then-Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg.
With Red Bull now the dominant force on the grid and starting the 2024 campaign with successive one-two finishes, Mercedes team principal Wolff has slyly reminded Horner of his plea to the FIA nearly a decade ago. Max Verstappen is the hot favourite to win a fourth-consecutive World Drivers’ Championship – but Wolff says he will not complain.
“I don’t want to fall into the trap of my fellow team principal from next door in 2014 or 15 who said we should change the regs because it [Mercedes] is too dominant,” Wolff said.
“I think they’ve done the best job of all the teams over the last two years, credit where credit is due. I mean they are literally disappearing into the distance as they want, and there’s nobody else close.
“But there is not a huge performance differential with everybody that follows depending on the track, it is just that [Red Bull] are in a different league and that is our sport. It is an honest sport and the best performance is being rewarded from car, machine and man.”
It comes nine years after Horner said “on today’s evidence we are set for a two-horse race at every grand prix this season,” following a Hamilton-Rosberg one-two finish in Australia.
Horner felt that the FIA had made several changes to even the grid when Red Bull were extremely successful in the early 2010s, adding: “When we were winning – and we were never winning with an advantage that Mercedes has – double-diffusers were banned, exhausts were moved, flexible bodywork was banned, engine-mapping was changed mid-season – anything was done to pull us back.
