


“It needs the tough battles and I think the highlight you could see yesterday was George and Max being able to battle it out. “But at the end it all comes down to racing,” Wolff pointed out. He held off the challenge of his teammate superbly, underlining his reputation as the so-called ‘King of the Streets’ (five of Pérez’s six F1 victories have now come on street circuits). Which is to take nothing away from Pérez. But there was little in the way of wheel-to-wheel action either between them or anyone behind them. This race was effectively decided by an early safety car, which worked in Pérez’s favour, allowing the Mexican to leapfrog his teammate at the front. I wouldn’t know today between Aston Martin and Ferrari and us who is quicker because you’re stuck where you’re stuck and that’s pretty much it.” “There was no overtaking today, even with a big pace difference,” Wolff complained. What Wolff did say was that the sport needed to work out why it was so difficult to overtake in general, and ask what it could do to change that. He conceded that Red Bull were ahead “on merit”, stressing it was up to the rest of the field “to do a better job” of closing the gap to them. If Red Bull’s rivals keep sounding off about how ‘boring’ and lacking in entertainment the racing is, it could help to convince Formula One’s rulemakers that regulation change is necessary to rein Red Bull in.īut Wolff did not call for a change in the regulations.

After all, his two drivers, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, were only able to finish sixth and eighth respectively, miles behind Red Bull’s Sergio Pérez and Max Verstappen, who were effectively in a race of their own at the front. By Tom Cary, Senior Sports Correspondent, in BakuĪfter all the talk about how chaotic and crazy Azerbaijan would be, with Formula One’s controversial new sprint format being introduced at Baku’s sketchy street circuit, the main event itself, it has to be said, was a complete dud.Įven Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff admitted following Sunday’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix that the sport urgently needed to find a way to improve the show, describing the race as “boring”, with Red Bull’s cars “sailing off into the sunset” and the rest of the field largely stuck in one long drawn-out procession behind.
