'No One Is Going To Catch Max This Year': Wolff Writes Off 2024 Season
F1Monday, 08 April 2024 at 16:30
Toto Wolff already wrote off the 2024 season after another race dominated by Red Bull and Max Verstappen.
Red Bull's winning streak came to a halt during the 2024 Australian Grand Prix. In Melbourne, the team from Milton Keynes didn't have a single driver on the podium.
The might have given hope to some fans who want to see a closer battle for the Championship. However, the Red Bull F1 team re-established their dominant position with another one-two result during the Japanese Grand Prix.
The Austrian team took home maximum points after Sergio Perez finished second behind his teammate Max Verstappen, who won the race and even scored the fastest lap.
Toto Wolff's Mercedes cars crossed the finish line in seventh and ninth place, +45.951 and +48.626 seconds behind the race leader. The team principal told the media after the race:
"No one is going to catch Max this year. His driving and the car are just spectacular. You can see the way he manages the tires and basically this season now is best of the rest."
"That's the fight that's on. Hopefully, we can catch up to the McLarens and Ferraris and fight for P2. This is what it is this year and what it was last year, and we had a P2 last year."
The problem is that even P2 or P3 seem too distant for Mercedes at the moment, which can be happy they retained the P4 position in the Championship, only one point ahead of Aston Martin.
As it stands, Mercedes lacks 86 points on Ferrari in second place and 35 points on McLaren in third. The team principal of the German team added:
"It is not satisfying for any team to be fighting for P2, P3 or P4. If I was to look from a purely sporting point of view, P1 is what matters, not P2, P3 or P4, but this is the reality we are facing at the moment."
"We're trying to make the best of this new reality, and that is to beat our competitors, whilst acknowledging that somebody is just doing a better job and setting a benchmark that we eventually need to set again ourselves."
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