The year in which Max Verstappen has stopped Lewis Hamilton’s unstoppable streak in its tracks, something that only Nico Rosberg managed to interrupt for a year, has been impregnated with unnecessary disqualifications between Toto Wolff and Christian Horner.
Flexible flaps here, overly optimistic handling there… With any excuse as a valid reason for it, Mercedes and Red Bull have beaten copper like never before off the track, all this while Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton were fighting on the asphalt for a title that finally ended up falling on the driver’s side Dutchman of the energy drink team.
The visible faces and, therefore, those directly in charge of fueling this war have been Toto Wolff and Christian Horner, the heads of their respective teams on the circuits, exceeding the limit on many occasions with personal disqualifications that under no context are allowed or accepted.
«I regret a lot; I always try to approach things professionally»
The absence of Wolff and Lewis Hamilton at the FIA awards gala, with James Allison along with Valtteri Bottas as the only representatives, was the end point (at least for now) of a camp battle from which neither Michael Masi, with whom Wolff was not interested in having a conversation after the ‘robbery’ in Abu Dhabi, Zak Brown or even Fernando Alonso and his ego, who made him receive a free stick from the Austrian.
“I really regret it a lot,” Wolff confessed about the levels that his dialectic battle against Horner has reached. “I always try to be professional and approach things professionally. At some point it became something very personal between the two of us, that’s true».
Mediator and testosterone
“He told me that ‘keep my mouth shut’, and then I responded by saying that it was a charlatan, who spoke too much for the cameras, and should not have said that,” Wolff acknowledged, aware that it is “a professional relationship.”
“You know that even your worst enemy has a best friend, so you have to respect that person, even if you fight a tough duel in a professional environment». It was Susie Wolff who brought him back down to earth by making him realize that he had gone too far.
“Susie made it very clear to me: ‘Why do you have these kinds of arguments? You are trying to win, respect that; even if someone goes in that direction, you don’t have to do the same’. That’s called female social intelligence,” he revealed, referring to his own wife, finally joking with “sometimes we have too many hormones” to lower the tension.