© Steve Etherington for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Toto Wolff says George Russell, as a Mercedes junior driver, should not lose sight of the “global perspective” and calls the Briton’s reasoning “bullsh*t”.
At the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix George Russell and Valtteri Bottas were involved in a huge crash when the young Briton tried to overtake the Mercedes driver for P9.
While Bottas and Russell blame each other, the FIA deemed the crash to be “a racing incident”. With Russell being a part of Mercedes’ junior driver programme, team boss Toto Wolff thinks he should have handled the whole situation differently.
“There is never such a situation in life where one is 100 percent to blame and the other zero,” the Austrian said after the race.
“The whole situation should have never happened. Valtteri had a bad first 30 laps, and shouldn’t have been there.
“But George should have never launched into this manoeuvre, considering that the track was drying up. It meant taking risks, and the other car is a Mercedes in front of him.
“In any driver’s development, for a young driver, you must never lose this global perspective. So yeah, lots to learn for him I guess.
“You need to see that there is a Mercedes and it is wet, it bears a certain risk to overtake. And the odds are against him anyway when the track is drying up.
“Now I don’t want him to try to prove anything to us, because one thing I can say since knowing Valtteri for five years, he’s not trying to prove anything.”
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Russell, who is considered to be a contender to take Valtteri Bottas’ seat at Mercedes in 2022, said after the race that Bottas made a small sudden move, that he perhaps wouldn’t have made if a different driver was attempting to overtake him. When the statement was relayed to Wolff, he wasn’t amused.
“That’s bullsh*t,” the Austrian said.
“The whole situation is absolutely not amusing for us, to be honest.
“It’s quite a big shunt. Our car is a write-off and in a cost-cap environment and that is certainly not what we needed because it’s probably going to limit the upgrades that we are able to do.
“Simply the fact that we ended there by losing it on the wet, because there was no contact before that, it was losing it on the wet, making both cars crash out is not what I expect to see.
“We are very stretched under the cost cap, and what we always feared was a total write-off of a car. This one is not going to be a total write-off, but almost.
“And that is not something that we wanted,” concluded Wolff.
