The Mercedes team principal has spoken, and he has spoken at length. Toto Wolff does not want to see his drivers pushing each other off the track as happened between the two Ferraris on the opening lap of the Italian Grand Prix. “I can express my opinion now and say this is not on to push your team mate off in turn two”, he said. Charles Leclerc, for his part, has accepted that he should not have pushed Lewis Hamilton off at that very place.
Then comes the admission, and it is worth its weight in press release: at the same corner, in the closing laps, the same thing very nearly happened at Mercedes. “Did we expect them to fight like they did? Which could have ended up in a car in a gravel bed. So we could have quickly looked like idiots as well, like the Ferraris looked eventually. So it’s a fine margin.” Your correspondent, who has translated a good many press releases for the canton, notes the wording: the fear is not the contact, the fear is the look of it.
The team principal tells the rest himself: Andrea Kimi Antonelli had come back at George Russell after using a Virtual Safety Car period in the second half of the race to take a fresh set of tyres, Russell being on the hards and, in the team’s view, in no need of a second stop. Three or four laps from the end, he says, Russell had a tyre that was shot and Antonelli was a second quicker. Toto Wolff defends the call without hedging: “It’s absolutely the right thing we did. He was on the hard [tyre]. It was predicted to be a one-stop as the better strategy.”
The gravel trap at turn two was used once on lap one and nearly used a second time at the end. At the post, we call that an area that works. I wave the flag. I don’t judge. Nothing further to report.
That leaves the passage that made your correspondent smile in his armchair. To dismiss the idea that his own driver had been penalised by the team, the Mercedes boss referred to “some couch warriors that will drop their comments after having watched some other material online”, and called the accusation nonsense. The man writing these lines has covered the Grand Prix from the press room, then from the grandstand, then from the sofa, and feels only a third targeted. The sofa has this in its favour: the race can be watched again on the recording, with the sound off, so as not to be influenced. We shall return to this.
It’s true, we checked: RaceFans.
