“That’s not going to happen”: Wolff’s 2023 defence of F1’s new rules has not aged well

Between finalising its controversial new power unit regulations for 2026, and framing the chassis rules which accompanied them, Formula 1 spent almost two years trying to get the balance right.

F1 signed off the power unit rules in August 2022 – though the general concept was agreed much earlier – and the chassis regulations followed in June 2024.

During that period the sport grappled with the question of how to cope with the compromises it forced on itself through the new power unit rules. This was chiefly the move to a ’50-50′ split in the contribution made by the internal combustion engine (previously by far the bigger contributor) and the battery.

Other decisions taken during the deliberations over power unit design further constrained the cars’ performance. The MGU-H of the 2014-25 regulations had been removed, to encourage new manufacturers such as Audi to enter, and teams were only permitted to regenerate energy through the rear axle, not the front.

This left F1 facing a clear problem which its chassis regulations needed to solve: Once a car’s battery was drained, it would begin to lose speed on a straight, so much so it would even have to drop down a gear or more. The nature of the problem would vary significantly from track to track: it would be most acute at those with the longest straights and shortest braking zones.

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff was unequivocal in his view that F1 could prevent this from happening. “That’s not going to happen,” he said at a media briefing in July 2023.

“Do you think that in all reality we are not innovative [enough] in this sport to come up with chassis and engine regulations that can avoid drivers shifting down on the straights?”

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Fast-forward to qualifying for the 2026 Australian Grand Prix: On his way to pole position, George Russell accelerated out of turn eight to a top speed of 327kph. Then, long before the next corner, his speed began to fall. And fall.

By the time he lifted the throttle for turn nine he had shed over 50kph and dropped two gears. The precise scenario his team principal ridiculed as an impossibility two-and-a-half years ago has come to pass.

As dismal a spectacle as qualifying has become this year, the shortcomings of the 2026 power units which Wolff complacently dismissed have caused more serious problems. The FIA is hard at work trying to find ways to ‘engineer out’ the risk of dangerously high closing speeds which it acknowledged contributed to Oliver Bearman’s huge crash at Suzuka.

But F1 cannot pretend it wasn’t warned of the potential for this problem. Oscar Piastri said at Suzuka: “We’ve spoken about that being a possibility since these cars were conceptualised.”

Among those who voiced concerns over the direction F1 was heading in was former Red Bull team principal Christian Horner. His critique of the rules has not entirely been borne out – for example, he feared overtaking might become too hard instead of ludicrously easy – but he correctly identified the difficulty of using the chassis rules to address the compromises F1 created with its engine specifications.

“I think that perhaps where we need to pay urgent attention before it’s too late is to look at the ratio between combustion power and electrical power,” said Horner, who feared the rules would create “a technical Frankenstein which will require the chassis to compensate to such a degree with movable aero, and to reduce the drag to such a level that the racing will be affected.”

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But Wolff was not having any of these suggestions from his rival, claiming Horner was trying to scupper the 2026 rules. “I think what frightens him more is maybe that his engine programme is not coming along and maybe he wants to kill it that way,” he said. “So you always have to question what’s the real motivation to say something like that.”

One might ask a similar question of Wolff’s motivation today for staunchly defending Formula 1’s heavily criticised regulations while his team romps away with the championship lead. Regardless, now F1 has the benefit of an unexpected five-week break, can it engineer its way out of the problem Wolff underestimated, or has it truly painted itself into a corner?

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