Toto Wolff touched on the subject of team orders at Mercedes after the duels between George Russell and Kimi Antonelli at the Formula 1 Canadian GP and under what circumstances he would impose the rule.
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Both in the Sprint race and in the Sunday GP on the 24th, the German team’s duo fought hard on the track. In fact, the young Italian was not happy with the British driver’s moves and complained a lot on the radio, receiving a call from the Austrian boss.
In the end, Russell retired on Sunday and Kimi won, increasing his lead to 43 points. Reflecting on the competitors’ battle, Wolff explained how Mercedes does not impose team orders unless the result is compromised. “It’s always easy to say at the end: ‘Well, that was great for the team and for the sport, and since we all like the fight, right?’.”
“And that is true to a certain extent, but there is another side we need to analyze: the situation got tense at times and, with Kimi backing off and locking up the tires, it could have ended in a double retirement. Not because of overly aggressive driving, simply because of a mistake. Therefore, it is important to analyze and discuss with the drivers if they thought the fight was tight and, if so, how to avoid these very difficult situations or situations we consider very close,” he said.
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“It’s easy to accept that they are fighting up to a point, but it won’t always be the case that we are half a second faster than everyone behind, so we had the advantage, we had the margin. As much as we seem like athletes today, allowing this, there may be a situation where maybe we should slow down,” he continued.
“As a team, as uncomfortable as the situation sometimes is, we have to accept that this is the fight they trained for, but in the same way, if there was a situation where we believed the team’s points were at risk of being lost, or if we were losing too much time to our competitors behind, we would not hesitate a millimeter to pull the handbrake,” he concluded.
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