Wolff: Adding downforce for 2017 a mistake (AR1 Agrees 100%)

Wolff is 100% correct. Adding downforce will only ruin the racing. Just as with IndyCars, downforce should be reduced significantly. Who cares about going 300 mph. It's more important to have good close racing.

Mercedes chief Toto Wolff reckons that the increase in downforce levels on the proposed 2017 cars is a "mistake" and will not lead to more exciting racing.

Under proposed regulations, which must be finalized by the end of the month, new bodywork rules will be introduced next year, focused on extra downforce, in an attempt by the FIA to "create more exciting cars."

Wolff is critical of the direction of the regulations and believes that the sport has made the "wrong decision" in wanting more downforce on the cars.

"The cars will not be able to follow each other," he explained in a Mercedes Q&A video.

"We have made a step towards more downforce which means the car following will have more disturbed air.

"At the moment when you follow a car closely you lose downforce – a great example was Lewis [Hamilton] and Max Verstappen in Melbourne; the same will happen next year but much more.

"Adding downforce was a mistake, we like a challenge, the guys in [the] aero [department] have taken the fight up but for Formula 1 and overtaking it was the wrong decision."

Wolff believes that Formula 1 needs to promote the current cars in a better way, after Lewis Hamilton set the quickest ever lap of the Bahrain International Circuit en-route to pole position last weekend.

"We've done that [record] with a much heavier car, a standard tyre, not like in the old days where there was a tyre war between Bridgestone and Michelin," he said.

"It's a major achievement and it's something which we should discuss more in public rather than talking the sport down and the inefficiencies.

"We should say 'this is a hybrid engine, maybe the most powerful ever in a Formula 1 car and we've broken lap records from an era with huge 10 cylinder engines'. Those cars are bloody fast, the fastest cars on the planet."