Wolff believes that the sport needs challenging tracks where mistakes can be punished.

“Two weeks ago I was on the Isle of Man, looking at the TT, and I found it very spectacular,” said Wolff.

“I think Baku is a spectacular track. It's just what we need in F1, although I can understand from the driver's perspective it needs to be as safe as possible.

“But one of the areas where F1 needs to improve is nobody wants to see racing on supermarket parkings, with run-off areas that are miles wide and where you can rejoin if you make a mistake.

"This makes all the difference, and therefore without having driven a car here, and this is why my view is probably subjective and I can't feel what the drivers feel, I think this is just what we need.”

Open race

Wolff admits that he has no idea how Sunday's race will pan out. “It's quite interesting actually because we don't know.

"You have seen the massive pile-up in GP2, and hopefully all the drivers have seen that, our drivers. Then you have this long straight where we expect a lot of overtaking.

"But I guess the race could be dominated by safety cars, or virtual safety cars. So I don't really know what to expect,” he added.

Although Mercedes have dominated the weekend in terms of pure pace – and its customers have also shown well – Wolff has downplayed the role played by speed on the straight.

“If you look at the speed traces, the gap doesn't come from straight line speed. We are actually not among the fastest teams on the straight line. But it comes more from the twisty parts around the old town.

"So I think it's a combination of a very aerodynamically efficient car, mechanical grip, horsepower and driveability.

"And then obviously the way you simulate and the way we put the car on the track on Friday gave us a big advantage, because the car was spot-on in the tyre window. The gaps are larger than expected."

He did concede that the power unit was working well: “The Mercedes engine, and I wouldn't say sheer crank power, seems to be a good power unit for Baku.

"I think there is probably more in it than just power, but it comes down to energy deployment, driveabilty, torque deployment, maybe lots of factors that make the power unit more competitive than the others.”

Wolff says he's not concerned about tyre warm-up being a problem for Mercedes in the race, despite the drivers running multiple laps in qualifying.

“I think that we are not worse on the first flying lap than the others. We tried to optimise it and found out that the second lap was a tiny bit better, and you could see that most of the teams they weren't quite sure.

"The Ferraris were doing second and fourth lap, and then they switched to fourth lap, the Toro Rossos did the first lap, the Force Indias switched as well. So it was not clear cut today. We were experimenting a little bit.”