Red Bull’s current advantage with its RB20 has opened up the prospect of it already looking certain to win the world championships this year, and potentially lock out every race victory.
Off the back of a similarly dominant 2023 campaign, this has prompted fears that the popularity of F1 could suffer if a closer battle at the front of the field doesn’t soon develop.
While the inability of Red Bull’s rivals to close down the deficit has prompted questions about whether or not F1’s new generation of rules have failed to deliver the spectacle hoped for, Wolff does not see things that way.
And he thinks it would be a mistake to pursue the route that Red Bull team boss Christian Horner did back in 2015, when he urged the FIA to change the regulations and peg back Mercedes as he enjoyed similar levels of domination.
“Mercedes have done a super job,” said Horner back then. “They have a good car, a fantastic engine and they have two very good drivers.
“The problem is that the gap is so big that you end up with three-tier racing. That is not healthy for F1.
“They [the FIA] have a power output so they can see what every power unit is producing. They have the facts. They could quite easily come up with a way of some form of equalization.”
Red Bull boss Horner called for rule changes when Mercedes dominated F1 in 2014-15
Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images
Wolff feels that it would be wrong to waste time thinking that the rules are at fault for what is happening right now, as he suggests it is completely down to Red Bull’s rivals to do a better job.
“I don’t want to fall in the trap of a fellow team principal from next door in 2014/15 who said we should change the regs because it’s too dominant,” said Wolff.
“I think they [Red Bull] have done by far the best job of all the teams over the last two years, and credit where credit is due. I mean, they are literally disappearing in the distance as they want and there’s nobody else close.
“It’s just that they are in a different league. And our sport is an honest sport. The best performance is being rewarded from car, from machine and man.”
Red Bull’s closest challenger right now is Ferrariwhich has admitted it remains a few tenths behind the Milton Keynes-based squad in both qualifying and race trim.
But his team principal Fred Vasseur says the current situation is one that he thinks can be changed, and that the focus needs to be on extracting more performance from the SF-24 rather than worrying about whether the rules are at fault.
“If we’re able to have the same improvement as we had last year, it’s encouraging,” he said. “Honestly, I’m focused on the team, I’m focused on the fact we have to develop the car.
“And even if one weekend we’re in front of Red Bull, I will keep this same approach and try to do a better job the week after.
“It’s not because we are P1, P2, P3 that you have to stop or develop more. We are fully pushing and will continue with the same approach.
“It’s out of my scope the fact that it’s interesting or not, but we’re just fully focused on the fact we have to catch up.
“It’s clear they still have an advantage on us, and we have to continue to develop and to push.”
