Toto Wolff: “Red Bull’s ‘minor’ breach? The word is not correct!”

The FIA have found Red Bull guilty of overspending last year by a maximum of five percent ($7.25m) above the $145m limit.

Reportedly that breach was due to staff issues at the team’s Milton Keynes headquarters including “free lunch”.

Mercedes F1 team principal Wolff has said about the rule-break: “Is it a so-called minor breach, because I think the word is probably not correct?

“If you’re spending $5m more, and you’re still in the minor breach, it still has a big impact on the championship.

“To give you an idea, we obviously monitor closely which parts are being brought to the track from the top teams every single race – for the 2021 season and the 2022 season.

“We can see that there are two top teams that are just about the same and there is another team that spends more.

“We know exactly that we’re spending – $3.5m a year in parts that we bring to the car. So then you can see what difference it makes to spend another $500,000.

“It would be a difference.”

Wolff explains how staying within the cost cap has prevented Mercedes from bringing their desired upgrades to the W13: “We haven’t produced lightweight parts for the car in order to bring us down from a double-digit overweight because we simply haven’t got the money. So we need to do it for next year’s car.

“We can’t homologate a lightweight chassis and bring it in, because it’s just $2m that we will be over the cap. So you can see every spend more has a performance advantage.”

The FIA are yet to decide Red Bull’s punishment.

Lewis Hamilton has previously explained how seemingly small expenditures above the budget can have a crucial impact on race results.

“If we had if we spent $300,000 on a new floor or an adapted wing it would have changed the outcome of the championship,” Hamilton said.

He missed out on an all-time record eighth title at the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix when Max Verstappen infamously pipped him.