Toto Wolff is wrong, the answer to solving Monaco’s problem is obvious but F1’s new rules could create even more issues

You didn’t need to watch the Monaco Grand Prix in 2025 to know that F1’s ill-fated tyre experiment went wrong.

A quick glance at the top four starting and finishing exactly where they qualified should tell you all you need to know instead of enduring 78 laps of watching a timing screen and guessing everyone’s pit strategy – even though they all did the same thing.

The mandated two-stop feels like one of those ideas that seems good on paper, but in practice, it’s a terrible concept.

It created a two-tier race where teams that put emphasis on qualifying both their drivers inside the top ten places were able to effectively manipulate the pace of the cars behind by driving six seconds a lap slower than the leaders.

By engaging in a bit of teammate skullduggery, it generated a farcical situation where teams were exploiting the diminutive size of Monaco’s streets to gain a strategic advantage. George Russell labelled Williams’ antics as “dangerous” over team radio and he was right; those near-misses are unnecessary when drivers are already having 19 of them during a lap with the barriers.

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff suggested F1 could introduce a maximum lap time for next season to prevent a similar scenario when speaking to Sky Sports F1, but in reality, the problem around Monaco has been glaringly obvious in the last two decades.

Why can’t Monaco just change its layout?

Suggestions on how to improve the Monaco GP range from changing the track layout to excluding it from the calendar entirely.

Getting rid of Monaco would arguably be the worst decision because it’s such an iconic race, and you’d be hard-pressed to find another venue that looks quite the same.

While Monaco has reclaimed land in the Mediterranean that could open up the possibility of a layout change, it is somewhat of a political hot potato for the royal family.

Changing the track layout also risks changing the skill needed to thread a car at an average speed of 108mph, plus, the short circuit generates more interesting strategic conundrums.

How F1 can solve its Monaco problem

The solution lies with the cars themselves. They are simply too wide.

The current F1 cars have a maximum wingspan of 78 inches, which makes it incredibly difficult to get more than one car through a section of track – as Gabriel Bortoleto found out on the opening lap with Andrea Kimi Antonelli.

In 2011, the maximum width was 71 inches. And the results are plain to see. Between the 2009 and 2013 seasons, there was a total of 72 overtakes. The 2011 season, when DRS was first introduced, had the most at 28 overtakes.

This saw a dramatic drop in 2017 when F1 cars adopted wider cars and fatter tyres, bringing the dimensions in at 79 inches.

The last time F1 had double figures for a race in Monaco was 2022 with 22 overtakes, but that is slightly skewed because of the wet conditions. The 2018 race had two overtakes, while in 2019 that number dropped to the all-time low of zero overtakes.

Overtaking at Monaco should be difficult, but not impossible. The solution would be to make the cars narrower to get back to the pre-2017 numbers when F1 cars started to get fatter. One of the specific pledges of the 2026 ruleset is a reduction to 74 inches in car width, but even this is not enough to generate on-track overtakes at Monaco.

A month earlier, the Monaco E-Prix took place and used the same layout. According to Formula E’s official website, the 2023 race had a staggering 113 overtakes. The maximum width of a Formula E car? 66.9 inches.

It’s too late in the day to make a change now, but with Monaco’s contract to host a race running up to 2031, the problem isn’t going to go away anytime soon.