Photo Credit: Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff says Max Verstappen’s win in the Italian Grand Prix that gave him a record 10th straight victory wouldn’t be important to him as “it’s for Wikipedia and nobody reads that anyway.”
The reigning World Champion Max Verstappen remains unbeaten since his winning streak begsn in Miami at the beginning of May and has since blitzed Sebastian Vettel’s previous record of nine straight wins in 2013, which was also achieved in a Red Bull car.
Verstappen said before the race that he doesn’t think too much about records like this and was just focused on winning the race. After battling with the Ferrari of Carlos Sainz, and eventually overtaking him on lap 15 to win in comfortable style, Verstappen was celebrating this record, holding up all his fingers and thumbs in Parc Fermé to acknowledge the achievement.
Wolff acknowledges Verstappen’s record but says it would have also been something a Mercedes driver could have achieved. They were shared between their drivers as he says they let Hamilton, Rosberg and Bottas fight fair and square for them.
“Our situation was maybe a little bit different because we had two drivers fighting against each other within the team,” said Wolff.
“I don’t know whether he cares about the record. It’s not something that would be important for me, any of those numbers. It’s for Wikipedia and nobody reads that anyway.”
Wolff added to it further in his written media session and said that it’s just his personal view, and has never focused on these kinds of records.
“We just talked about it. For me, these types of records are completely irrelevant. They were irrelevant in our good days in Mercedes. I don’t know how many races we won in a row and I didn’t even know that there was a count for how many races in a row you win. Therefore, asking me on commenting on some achievement is difficult because it never played a role in my whole life. The result itself shows that a great driver in a great car are competing on an extremely high level.”
The Mercedes team principal says he would be more impressed if Red Bull were to win every race this season, something that has never been achieved in Formula 1. Mercedes were the team to beat from 2014 to 2016 and won races in dominant fashion, be it for a few driver errors and reliability failures, Wolff spoke about how his team could have won every race in 2016, in particular.
“I think they need to screw it up themselves. They are on track to win every race this season and that, by the way, is a record that I would think is a good one, because that is perfection. We didn’t make it in 2016 because our two drivers pushed each other out in Barcelona and then we had an engine failure in Malaysia.”
