Toto Wolff has called on Formula One to act to prevent a recurrence of an uneventful Azerbaijan Grand Prix which he accurately summed up as “boring”. Wolff, the Mercedes team principal, highlighted the difficulty of overtaking in Baku that made for a race that was largely a procession from start to finish.
Red Bull’s Sergio Pérez won from teammate Max Verstappen at the grand prix in a dominant one-two where such was their pace advantage they finished over 21 seconds up the road from Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, who was third. Behind them a combination of caution over tyre wear to ensure completing a one-stop strategy, and the recurring difficulty of passing due to dirty air, ensured the race was very much a barely interrupted train.
Lewis Hamilton finished sixth for Mercedes while his teammate George Russell was eighth and Hamilton had observed how hard attempting to pass had been as he chased Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz. Wolff acknowledged that it was not a good promotion for the sport.
“There was no overtaking, even with a big pace difference,” he said. “It made it not great entertainment. We have to analyse the weekend with the sprint format, whether there’s positives we can take out.”
The meeting was the first of F1’s new sprint format weekend, with the sprint race itself a similarly lacklustre affair but for Russell’s early skirmish with Verstappen. A fight that only served to highlight how bland Sunday’s GP had been.
“At the end it all comes down to racing,” said Wolff. “It needs the tough battles and I think the highlight you could see on Saturday was George and Max being able to battle it out and on Sunday there was none of that. Even if you were within 0.2 seconds it was very difficult to overtake, nearly impossible to overtake unless the other driver makes a mistake. We need to really look at it, we need to look at how we can avoid just a boring race.”
F1 introduced new regulations in 2022 in an effort to improve passing while racing by reducing the dirty air coming off the back of the cars. It was to an extent successful but has not delivered the great improvement in overtaking that was hoped for and this year, drivers report that the situation has only become worse. In the wake of Red Bull’s dominance, the chasing teams of Ferrari, Aston Martin and Mercedes were left powerless in a procession, a situation Wolff said was not engaging for fans.
“It’s about understanding why it was not entertaining ,” he added. “We have two cars that are sailing off into the sunset on merit and then we have a 20-second gap. 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. We need to find more data sets in the next races to see how this is going and then we need to adjust.”
The next meeting is this week in Miami. With Red Bull having won all four rounds and the sprint race thus far, Verstappen leads the world championship from Pérez by six points with 19 rounds remaining.
