F1 News: Toto Wolff Reveals He'd Rather Lose Championship Than Break The Rules

Integrity and loyalty matter more to Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff than winning a championship.

Speaking on a rather difficult time period that Mercedes has been going through, team principal Toto Wolff revealed that his team would catch up with Red Bull the right way as integrity and loyalty are more important to him than breaking the rules to win the championship. 

Currently, Mercedes stares at a campaign where it hasn't achieved even a single victory. If this trend is to continue, it would be the team's first winless F1 season in more than a decade. The reason mostly comes from the W14's aerodynamics which literally saw ups and downs in terms of the ride height in the last 18 months. However, a probable solution appears over the horizon in 2024.

While there is one faction of the grid with the likes of Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso, and a few other team principals who blame the FIA's 2022 rule change as the reason for Red Bull's sweeping dominance. Wolff is of the opinion that Red Bull's success comes from their meritocracy. 

In fact, he believes that the rules won't be able to stop the Milton Keynes outfit and it was all up to his team to do the catching up legitimately. He told Planet F1: 

“As a team principal, I don’t want to jump on the bandwagon that others have done in the past of saying we need to change the regulations because we can’t continue with the dominance of a team.

“If a team dominates in the way Max has done with Red Bull then fair dues, this is a meritocracy."

Despite the severe setbacks the Brackley team has been experiencing, Wolff explained that eventually, his team would catch up with Red Bull. And when that happens, it would be done the right way, without any trickery or cheating. He added:

“I think the interesting part of the journey is that you’re putting these words on a PowerPoint, but you need to live by the standards every day, whether you win or whether you lose.

"And we’ve had challenging moments. I think a reason why we won was no blame culture.

"I would give up a championship before I break the rules in an intentional way because reputation and integrity are all today.

"I don’t want to be judged by a championship or two. I want the team to be judged after 20 years for whether we’ve done more things right or wrong, loyalty, we’ve not lost many people.

"And it needs to start by myself, not blaming someone rather than blaming the process. So I think as a team we’ve done pretty well.”