F1, Toto Wolff bluntly on the comparison between Mercedes and Ferrari

Toto Wolff weighs in on the comparison between Mercedes and Ferrari

Mercedes ended the 2022 season of the F1 World Championship on a high, with George Russell’s double win in Brazil being the icing on the cake, but for a team capable of winning seven drivers’ world titles (with Lewis Hamilton) between 2014 and 2020 and one more among constructors in 2021, it is hardly a satisfactory result.

Toto Wolff, however, wanted to respond to those who tried to compare the Brackley-based stable’s “end-cycle” with that of the post-2008 Ferrari, which in 14 seasons failed to add anything to its trophy cabinet except single race wins.

“We were at fault this year,” the Austrian executive told ‘Auto Motor und Sport,’ “it took us half a season to figure out the ‘porpoising’ issue. Apart from the car, however, everything else is stable, from the team to the drivers. After the Schumacher era and Raikkonen’s title, however, Ferrari lost key elements at the team level. The situation was very different.”

On the future, then, there is relative optimism: “The budget cap will decrease the gap between the top teams, we will hardly see a team win eight world championships in a row,” Wolff explained. “We will try to make the most of the extra time in the wind tunnel that we will have compared to Red Bull and Ferrari.