Toto Wolff is fine to be beaten by a customer team for F1 championship than anyone else, as he heaps praise on work done by McLaren to beat them and others.
The hybrid era has been certainly dominated by Mercedes. It started off by the works team winning the constructors’ championship for eight seasons until Honda stopped their parade. But the Japanese manufacturer has been stopped early after just the two seasons.
It is the German manufacturer on top again, but this time it isn’t at the hands of the works team. It is their customer outfit McLaren, who have done the job. After Red Bull’s success with Renault, this is the first time that a customer team has beaten the works team and others to win the F1 title.
Wolff is fine with it, though. He is happy to be beaten by a team using the Mercedes power unit rather than give it to a rival manufacturer. “To be honest, if we can’t win as a works team, I’d much rather be beaten by a customer team,” he said to media. “I have zero problem with that, because it gives shows us where the benchmark is.
“There’s no discussions about performance levels of the engine, no discussions about drivability of the engine, energy deployment or harvesting. None of that. World Champion is our customer team. They have equal material. We fight on same terms, and if they have a better chassis or better execution or better drivers, then that’s completely fine for us.
“And this is a success also for Mercedes motorsport, success for Mercedes and a success for HPP [High Performance Powertrains], whilst we know that our works team is by far the primary objective to win. I think it was our mentality in the, let’s say, new era, that not only the regulations say you need to be on equal material, but it’s also how we take it.
“That’s why the question is, do you want to be beaten by a customer team? I’d rather be beaten by a customer team and know what the benchmark lies. From that perspective, they have equal opportunity like we do and when you look at cost cap, clearly that has an effect,” summed up Wolff, who has praise for McLaren for the job well done. He also sees advantage in finishing fourth as they do have more windtunnel time.
“You look at ATR, we are fourth in the championship,” he continued. “Now that is 20% more ATR than McLaren, which is advantageous. This is where they were in the past, but that is not the reason why they won. They won because of good engineering. As simple as it is, great engineering, bright leadership, good drivers.
“Two drivers that were scoring, and you have to give them all credit for that. When you consider where McLaren came from a year and a half [ago], they weren’t even making it out of Q1. They became a race-winning car at the end of last year, and they win a Constructor. I mean, somebody would have said that to us two years ago, [I would have said] ‘Which planet are you living?’,” summed up Wolff.
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