"You get less for crimes!": Red Bull boss blasts Toto Wolff for his ‘dominance’ criticism

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner took a hit on Toto Wolff's 'dominance' statement about the former, remarking that Mercedes' domination in the sport was longer than what a criminal would serve for a petty crime.

He said on the ESPN Unlapped podcast,

"Seven long years... that's a long time. You get less for crimes!"

Toto Wolff, the team principal of Mercedes, shared a statement about the domination that Red Bull currently has, winning every single race this season and making it impossible for others to compete. He had stated that the races look like one F1 car being chased by a bunch of Formula 2 cars.

At the same time, it was Mercedes who had a similar spell of domination from 2014 to 2021. Lewis Hamilton won all of the championships during this time (except for 2016 when his teammate Nico Rosberg won) and the team broke many Formula 1 records. These are the same seven years that Horner reflected in his statement.

Horner added when Mercedes was dominating in the way RBR is today, the Milton Keynes-based team had to work their way up to get into a competitive position.

"We had to wait to get back into a competitive position. We had to do a lot of watching of a lot of Mercedes winning and so on. But we never lost sight of our target, we were still winning races every single year at circuits we could excel at," Horner said.

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Red Bull labels Mercedes domination as 'easy'

Mercedes' domination was one of the longest in the history of the sport. It came right after Red Bull's first domination phase with Sebastian Vettel ended with the introduction of the V6 turbo hybrid engines. The Renault engines were not strong enough in this era as Mercedes was dominating.

Christian Horner described this as being 'one-legged.' Red Bull's deal with Honda in 2019 gave them a strong base, and the team had to work on the car, which they did. It wasn't until 2021 that they had a car strong enough to challenge Mercedes, which they eventually did with Max Verstappen winning his maiden world championship.

"We never lost that target, it was just about putting the missing pieces into place. Then when we got a competitive power unit, bang, we were able to go toe to toe with Mercedes," Horner said.

Horner added that it was 'easy' for the Brackley team to dominate while RBR was 'one-legged.'

"They were lucky to have it so easy when we were running one-legged!"