“We can tell two top teams are about the same but another spends more”

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff says it is clear one of the leading teams in Formula 1 has been spending more than the others.

His opposite number at Red Bull, Christian Horner, yesterday criticised rivals for alleging his team exceeded the budget cap during 2021. It followed reports the FIA, which is completing its assessment of data submitted by teams on how much they spent last year, has found two teams in breach of the Financial Regulations, which were introduced last year.

In response to Horner’s claim the comments made about his team were “defamatory”, Wolff called the exchanges between team principals over the row “noise”.

“There’s a process,” he said. “On Wednesday there’s going to be certificates of compliance that are going to be issued or not and then if somebody has not complied, there’s a process and a governance that’s in place.

“For me, I’m 100% sure that the FIA is going to do the right thing. So everything else is all chatter until then. For us it’s important that the cost cap is being complied with. It’s cornerstone of the new regulations and I very much hope that all the teams have done that.”

Horner raised doubt over the accusations levelled at his team, asking how a competitor could have knowledge of their finances. Wolff said the information Mercedes had gathered by observing their rivals indicated one team’s spending was out of line with the others.

“We obviously monitor closely which parts are being brought to the track from the top teams every single race, ’21 season and ’22 season,” he said. “And we can see that there is two top teams that are just about the same, but there is another team that spends more.

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“So we know exactly that we’re spending three and a half million a year in parts that we bring to the car and then you can see what difference it makes to spend another 500,000 – it would be a big difference.”

Wolff said his team had to make compromises in order to keep their spending within the cap. “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,” he said. “So we need to do it for next year’s car.

“We can’t homologate a lightweight chassis and bring it in…