Toto Wolff questions FIA and Red Bull as Verstappen keeps 2021 title

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Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has insisted that there is nothing minor about Red Bull’s ‘minor breach’ of the FIA’s budget cap in 2021. The Austrian outfit were found to have broken the limit when the results of an FIA investigation into the financial data of all teams was released on Monday, with the extent of their punishment yet to be decided upon by the powers that be, although Lewis Hamilton is not expected to be awarded last year’s Drivers’ Championship title that was won by Max Verstappen.

The designation of Red Bull’s spending in 2021 as a ‘minor breach’ means that they exceeded the budget cap by no more than £5.7million, although team principal Christian Horner remains adamant that no wrongdoing took place. Wolff, however, believes that Red Bull would have reaped the rewards of their excessive spending habits last year despite only being found responsible for a minor infraction.

“Is it a so-called minor breach? Because I think the word is probably not correct,” said Wolff.

“If you’re spending five million more, and you’re still in the minor breach, it still has a big impact on the championship. To give you an idea, we obviously monitor closely which parts are being brought to the track from the top teams every single race for the 2021 season and the 2022 season.

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“We can see that there are two top teams that are just about the same and there is another team that spends more. We know exactly that we’re spending three and a half million a year in parts that we bring to the car. So then you can see what difference it makes to spend another $500,000 [£451,467]. It would be a difference.”

Wolff went on to draw attention to Mercedes by explaining the thought process behind the construction of their W13 challenger, which is said to be one of the heaviest cars on the grid. He insisted that although the Silver Arrows would have been happy to spend money on building a lighter chassis, they would simply have been unable to do so without breaching the FIA’s strict financial regulations.

“We haven’t produced lightweight parts for the car in order to bring us down from a double-digit overweight because we simply haven’t got the money,” he added. “So we need to do it for next year’s car.

“We can’t homologate a lightweight chassis and bring it in, because it’s just $2million [£1.8m] that we will be over the cap. So you can see, every spend more has a performance advantage.”

Red Bull are expected to be hit with a financial sanction or a minor sporting penalty as a result of their breach, with a further announcement set to be made by the FIA in due course. A financial penalty would see a fine imposed on Red Bull which they would be obligated to pay within a period of 30 days, but if they fail to do so, they will be banned from taking part in any future events until the fine has been settled.

Meanwhile, the options available to the FIA regarding a minor sporting penalty would include a reprimand, a reduction in testing time, a deduction of points for the season in question, suspension from an event or a reduction in Red Bull’s individual budget cap for 2023.

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