“You can’t slow us down”– Toto Wolff is confident that new regulations motivate his team even in 2022, extending their reign.
Toto Wolff is confident that the new regulations will help Mercedes in the following year’s championship, as his team feel motivated and curbs complacency.
This sentiment has stemmed from the feeling that the new regulations are targeted to slow down Mercedes and break their domination in the sport.
“It is difficult to motivate a team that has had so much success to be even better every year,” Wolff said in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
“You can see that in other sports as well. You always have to ask yourself what the new goal is. The next rule change…it helps enormously. We want to prove across the changes that you can’t slow us down.”
“We’ve managed since 2014 to keep competing for and winning titles in 2017 and 2019 despite all the rule changes. Even for this year, there was another change [to the regulations] with the aim of changing the order of the standings.”
We lost a lot
Wolff also claimed that his team had lost massive pace over the years while F1 trying to make the sport more competitive, yet he takes it sportingly as he understands F1’s requirements.
“They cost us a lot of performance in absolute terms and especially relative to other teams. We lost about five or even more tenths of a second per lap.
“That’s a fact. I understand that the rights holder of Formula One always has an interest in offering a championship that is as competitive as possible.
“It’s not good for anyone that the same team with the same driver dominates for years. Formula 1, like any top sport, needs variability and unpredictability.
“It would be best if the World Championship was decided by a one-point difference in the last race. We take this attempt to slow us down sportingly. We now have to make the best of it. In a way, we needed it to be able to set new goals.”
