Wolff not interested in efforts to hobble Red Bull

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff says he isn't interested in backing rule changes to reel in the rival Red Bull squad, which is currently romping away to victory in this year's world championship.

With eight races remaining in the season, Red Bull has more than three hundred points in hand over its rivals in the constructors championship, with Max Verstappen holding a 145 point lead in the drivers battle.

The team has won all 14 Grands Prix so far in 2023 with many predicting a clean sweep of the whole season. Verstappen has claimed a record ten wins in a row, the most recent being the Italian Grand Prix last week in Monza.

The lack of competition this season is giving rise to fears that it's affecting the popularity of the sport after its historic high in 2021 on the back of the epic Verstappen/Lewis Hamilton battle.

But Wolff said he didn't think the situation should be tackled by changing the sport's rules in order to enforce a level playing field, saying that Red Bull deserves to benefit from all their efforts.

• Read also: Rosberg explains Wolff's unhappy mindset behind 'Wikipedia' jibe

“As a team principal, I don’t want to jump on a 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," Speedcafe reported him as saying.

"This is a meritocracy, and as long as you comply with the regulations – technical, sporting, and financial – then you just need to say ‘Well done!’, and then it’s up to us to catch up.

“If that takes a long time, then it takes a long time," he added. “If a team dominates in the way Max has done with Red Bull, then its fair dues.

“I remember people crying foul when it was us," he continued. "Entertainment follows sport and not the other way around. We can’t be WWE, with scripted content. We don’t want to be scripted content.”

Mercedes claimed eight back-to-back constructors championships following the introduction of modern hybrid engines. But that came to a sudden end with rule changes in 2021 and 2022 swinging things back to Red Bull.

“2020 was a super dominant year for us, I think the best car we’ve ever had, but then towards the end of the season they changed the regs by cutting the floor out, and that was to stop us.

"You can see the results in 2021, we were not as competitive as Red Bull," he said. “At Silverstone, we unlocked more of the potential of the car and got ourselves back into the championship.

“I think we probably lost the 2021 drivers’ championships for many reasons,” Wolff 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.

"Back in the day, these regs were clearly targeted to re-establish the pecking order."

The current order has been largely dictated by how well teams responded to the return of ground effect aerodynamics, with Mercedes suffering initial problems with 'porpoising' that left them behind the curve.

Red Bull's Adrian Newey was able to use his experience of ground effect from the 1980s and 1990s to hit the ground running and give his current team an advantage that so far has been impossible for the other teams to match.

The next major changes to F1's technical, engine and sporting regulations aren't due until 2026, suggesting two more seasons of Red Bull wins and titles in store.

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