Toto Wolff Agrees With Fans On "Boring" Azerbaijan GP: "Have To Analyse"
After a "boring" Azerbaijan Grand Prix, according to Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff, the Austrian has asked the rest of the grid to analyse the weekend's events and brainstorm ways to make future races more thrilling for both the drivers and the fans. Wolff was dismayed by the lack of action on Sunday's race, where overtaking was deemed "nearly impossible."
Lewis Hamilton and George Russell both found themselves struggling to race behind other cars with it looking as though these new-generation cars weren't running too well in dirty air. On top of this, Mercedes simply didn't have the power or speed to make swift overtakes like the Red Bulls, for example. During the race, Hamilton even asked if his team could give him more power to match Carlos Sainz of Ferrari.
The race's highlight was a second win from Sergio Perez at the Baku Circuit, but with the height of excitement being the idea of someone crashing. Wolff was less than impressed by the overall entertainment value of the street race and its lack of overtaking opportunities.
"There was no overtaking, even with a big pace difference," Wolff told reporters in Baku. "It made it not great entertainment. We have to analyze the weekend with the sprint format, whether there are positives we can take out."
In fact, this weekend's entertainment came down to Russell and Max Verstappen getting heated in parc ferme. Fans were quick to jump on the action, but Wolff put it down to a racing incident.
"At the end of the day, it all comes down to racing," Wolff said. "We need the tough battles, and I think the highlight you could see yesterday was George and Max being able to battle it out. Today, there was none of that.
“Even if you were within 0.2 seconds it was very difficult to overtake, it was nearly impossible to overtake unless the other driver makes a mistake.
“We need to really look at it and how we can make it better. Not how we can make it better, we need to look at how we can avoid just a boring race.
“I’m not sure that 100m more DRS would have made a difference."
It's clear that Wolff is concerned with the integrity of the sport. But strategically, he's of course fighting to make it easier for his drivers to overtake. Of course, a team that's fighting for a Constructor Championship will argue that there needs to be more overtaking because they are the ones that want to be overtaking. Whether other teams will agree with this, I'm not sure.