You need to Rely on Integrity of People: Mercedes

Earlier, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff claimed that Ferrari had a five-tenths advantage in Hockenheim. Wolff even suggested that the recent improvement from the Italian team and its customers were a result of exploiting certain regulations. He believes that these regulations cannot be monitored by the FIA.

The Austrian tried his level best not to make an out and out accusation. However, he made his doubts about the legality of the Ferrari engine explicitly clear.

“If someone, and I’m not saying somebody is, because the fact is I don’t know, we are not in anybody’s engine, we are not in anybody’s bodywork, but if someone were prepared to risk his reputation then there is very little possibility to police that,” said the Austrian.

Wolff said that there is a need to rely on the integrity of people and organisations. In the wake of all the scepticism in Formula One, there needs to be integrity within the FIA. There also needs to be integrity between competitors.

“What we’ve seen is that on racetracks that should have suited us – Silverstone and Hockenheim – they had a car that was very good on the chassis side and a power unit that was the benchmark in the field,” he continued. “The only reaction we can have to that is not to say ‘What are they doing?’ but the reaction should be ‘What can we do in order to accelerate our own development program?’.

Although the FIA has cleared the Ferrari unit of any wrongdoing, there are still concern among rival manufacturers. They fear that the Italian company has found a performance gain related to the hybrid system. This could result in the increase in performance for both the works and customer teams. Especially after the introduction of an upgraded MGU-K unit and energy store.