Lewis Hamilton’s controversial championship defeat in 2021 gave people more sympathy for Mercedes, says team principal Toto Wolff.
“I would have rather won the championship, but today we have more fans,” he told the BBC.
Hamilton was on course to win the race and the championship at the season finale in Abu Dhabi. However he lost the title to Max Verstappen who overtook him after a final-lap restart which was arranged in contravention of the rules. Wolff said he still feels the pain of the defeat a year and a half later.
“Both drivers started with equal points into this race,” he said. “Best man and best machine wins, and the best men that day didn’t win. And it’s still something that that stings, not of losing it because I would have been able [and] all of us would have been able to lose that race fair and square and admit that. But it was stolen and that made it difficult.”
FIA race director Michael Masi was removed from his position as a result of the controversy and the governing body made sweeping changes to how races are run.
“The FIA was with its next regime, a new president was voted in literally that month, and was able to admit that a mistake was made and it was “human error”, that’s how they called it,” said Wolff. “But obviously that was not bringing us the trophy back and was not making Lewis the only eight-time world champion.
“But you just need to overcome it. And I think Lewis and I are very similar in that respect, we are able to compartmentalise. But it is what it is. Much worse things happen in the world than being stolen of a Formula 1 world championship.”
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Mercedes won its eighth consecutive constructors championship that year. Verstappen’s success ended a run of seven straight title wins by Mercedes drivers.
However Wolff believes there was an upside to their controversial defeat. “The interesting phenomenon was that we as a team, and Lewis as a driver, we didn’t have a lot of credit and sympathy because we won so many times and we became the underdog in that moment. People cheered for us and that is still a positive today.”
Hamilton is yet to commit to returning to drive for Mercedes in the 2024 F1 season and beyond. Wolff said he’s “an important pillar of the team” and “I’m doing everything I can to make him stay.”
“I think there’s no need to persuade him,” he added. “He knows about all the goodness and although we struggled with the car this year and last year, he will be part of the resurrection of the team.”
Wolff also described how he and Hamilton stopped speaking for a while after Hamilton lost the 2016 world championship to his team mate Nico Rosberg in another race at the Yas Marina circuit. Hamilton won more races than Rosberg but lost the title by five points.
“A key moment was at the end of 2016 where we didn’t speak to each other for a while,” said Wolff. “So I invited him to come to my kitchen in Oxford and sit down and have a chat.
“The kind of analogy I gave to him is that also I have arguments with Susie [Wolff, his wife]. Even if we shout [at] each other, which doesn’t happen a lot, but even if we have these arguments, there’s never thought of divorcing. And that’s why I said to him ‘I don’t want to divorce you, and neither do you, because I want the best racing drivers in our cars and you want to have the best car’.
“So we came to the conclusion that we can have conflicts, we can create an atmosphere where we are able to be brutally honest with each other. And sometimes we agree to disagree, but we move on.”
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