Toto Wolff wants F1 and its teams to ‘analyze’ and make sure to avoid a repeat of ‘boring’ Azerbaijan GP

Toto Wolff highlighted the dire need to bring changes after an uneventful Azerbaijan GP.

Toto Wolff wants F1 and its teams to ‘analyze’ and make sure to avoid a repeat of ‘boring’ Azerbaijan GP

Toto Wolff

The Azerbaijan GP is often considered one of the most entertaining races on the F1 calendar. However, fans were disappointed after the 2023 race with a rather underwhelming weekend, despite the debut of the new F1 Sprint format. Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff believes that analysis might be necessary to understand what happened.

The 51-year-old recognized the sheer lack of overtaking in the race even though the top teams had a healthy pace advantage. Wolff said, “There was no overtaking, even with a big pace difference.” The Austrian billionaire mentioned how the race felt like a snooze fest for the viewers as they couldn’t see wheel-to-wheel action. He continued, “It made it not great entertainment.”

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The Mercedes team boss was convinced that F1 and the teams must delve into the entire weekend and work on the positive aspects. Toto Wolff explained, “We have to analyse the weekend with the sprint format. Whether there’s positives we can take out.” Toto Wolff stated that at the end of the day, racing is what matters in Formula 1. He said, “At the end it all comes down to racing.”

Wolff quickly highlighted that the main race didn’t have thrilling fights between drivers. At the same time, Max Verstappen and George Russell had a battle during the Sprint race. He explained, “It needs the tough battles. And I think the highlight you could see yesterday was George and Max being able to battle it out. And today, there was none of that.”

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“We need to look at how we can avoid just a boring race,” Toto Wolff urges FIA

The incident between Max Verstappen and George Russell at the Azerbaijan GP
The incident between Max Verstappen and George Russell at the Azerbaijan GP Sprint

The Austrian pointed out the difficulty in overtaking for drivers even if they were right behind the car in front. Toto Wolff continued, “Even if you were within 0.2 seconds, it was very difficult to overtake. It was nearly impossible to overtake unless the other driver made a mistake.”

Subsequently, the 51-year-old demanded that changes be considered to prevent such a race in the future. Toto said, “We need to really look at it and how we can make it better. Not how we can make it better; we need to look at how we can avoid just a boring race.”

Lastly, the Mercedes team boss believed that the reduction in the DRS zone this season would not have affected the on-track action. The DRS zone on the main straight was reduced by 100m for this season to prevent a Red Bull run away like in 2022. He concluded, “I’m not sure that 100m more DRS would have made a difference.”

Thus, Toto Wolff has clearly stated the need for F1 to think about changes to provide better racing. The ground-effect rules introduced in 2022 were meant to prevent such a scenario, but the Azerbaijan GP contradicted the rules. As such, there is a lot of work to be done at the pinnacle of motorsport to understand what is needed to ensure good racing.

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