Toto Wolff says the timing of Lewis Hamilton’s determination to maneuver to Ferrari left him unable to react within the driver market.
Hamilton signed with Ferrari in the beginning of this 12 months, with the seven-time world champion transferring to Maranello in 2025. The announcement of the change was made on February 1, previous to the beginning of the present season however a matter of weeks after a number of main drivers had signed contract extensions at their present groups, one thing Wolff says caught him out.
“I at all times see a possibility in change,” Wolff stated within the recently-released guide ‘Inside Mercedes F1: Life within the Quick Lane’. “For a minute, I used to be in disbelief on the timing of it. The following we talked about what it meant for the workforce.
“I just like the scenario. It helps us as a result of it avoids the second the place we have to inform the game’s most iconic driver that we went to cease.
“There’s a motive why we solely signed a one-plus-one-year contract. We’re in a sport the place cognitive sharpness is extraordinarily essential, and I imagine everybody has a shelf life. So I would like to have a look at the following era. It’s the identical in soccer. Managers like Sir Alex Ferguson or Pep Guardiola. They anticipated it within the efficiency of their high stars and introduced in junior gamers who drove the workforce for the following years.
“I completely had it on my radar that Lewis would go. I simply couldn’t perceive why he’d change to a different workforce earlier than we knew if we had been going to be aggressive. It additionally didn’t give me any time to react. I needed to emergency name our companions, and I presumably missed out on negotiating with different drivers who had signed contracts a couple of weeks earlier like Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris.”
Wolff was reflecting on the scenario nearer the time, and regardless of it leaving him with a troublesome determination to make – ultimately selling Andrea Kimi Antonelli – he says it was not damaging to the connection between himself and Hamilton.
“It put us on the again foot, and that had a business influence. However do I take that personally? This was a enterprise determination. We’ve loved such a profitable journey collectively, and now we have now our personal goals. This didn’t even transfer the needle for me. I’m thick-skinned. I’ve had some fairly powerful moments in my life, and this doesn’t examine.”
