© Steve Etherington for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Toto Wolff reveals he was talking to Max Verstappen about joining Mercedes, but he could only “offer him a place in GP2 and then maybe a contract”.
Toto Wolff reveals he has talking to Max Verstappen about possibly joining Mercedes, before the Dutch driver had made his Formula 1 debut.
The Austrian says at the time there was no possibility to offer Max a race seat.
“Yeah, but I didn’t have a seat in Formula 1 that I could offer him,” Wolff told Motorsport Italy.
“We had Lewis [Hamilton] and Nico [Rosberg] and they both had long-term contracts.
“Max was clearly an interesting young man but at the time we could offer him a place in GP2 and then maybe a contract.
“But Helmut was able to offer him a place in Formula 1 and in the end I also advised him to go that route. And that meant seeing him leave the Mercedes orbit.”
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Red Bull was able to offer Verstappen a race seat with their second time Toro Rosso (now AlphaTauri), so Wolff was asked if Mercedes ever considered starting a second team.
“It is undoubtedly an advantage to be able to have a team like they have, in which you can evaluate the drivers on the field.
“It was a big advantage in their case to be able to evaluate Honda [in 2018 with Toro Rosso] before the move to the main team [a year later], but it is a very expensive operation.
“You have to be able to afford to spend 100 million a season to be able to judge the drivers, and I repeat, it is the best way to do it, but it is also very expensive,” Wolff concluded.
