Mercedes boss Toto Wolff says “enough has been said” over Ferrari’s 2019 engine and says he “can’t listen anymore” to Mattia Binotto playing down its aero performance.
Ferrari moved to lower expectations prior to the delayed 2020 season-opener in Austria after revealing that it had altered its aerodynamic development in the wake of poor correlation.
Ferrari has struggled throughout the weekend at the Red Bull Ring, with last year’s pole sitter Charles Leclerc taking only seventh in qualifying, while Sebastian Vettel was knocked out in Q2.
It continued a theme from testing which appeared to indicate that Ferrari had relinquished its straight-line speed advantage without improving its corner speed.
On Friday Vettel suggested that Ferrari was struggling everywhere with its SF1000, which he labelled as “draggy”.
Ferrari’s customer teams Haas and Alfa Romeo also lacked pace throughout the weekend and relinquished lap time year-on-year.
Wolff, along with Red Bull team boss Christian Horner, suggested on Friday that Ferrari should release details of the settlement it reached with the FIA over its 2019 power unit, an idea that was swiftly rejected by Binotto.
“I don’t want to comment on this, I think enough has been said,” said Wolff.
“This is more about the way things are being managed. And let’s not go back there.
“I think everything has been said back and forth, they haven’t shown great performance today, we want them to be competitive and race with us, race under the same rules.
“Nothing would make me more happy than if we have three or four teams be competitive out there and giving us a run for our money.”
On Ferrari playing down its aerodynamic performance a terse Wolff commented: “Not they have talked it down, but Mattia has talked it down. And… er… I can’t listen to that anymore.”
When the year-on-year speed loss was put to Haas’ Romain Grosjean, he replied: “It’s always difficult to compare different years but in general all Ferrari power unit users have moved a little bit backwards in qualifying at least and the others have improved a lot.
“I guess we had an advantage last year that we don’t seem to be having.”
His team-mate, Kevin Magnussen, said: “People can speculate for themselves [on the speed loss] all they want but it’s not something I’m going to speculate in.”
