Toto Wolff appears to cut-off Valtteri Bottas amidst Mercedes celebration

Tanish Chachra | 29/03/2021
Toto Wolff appears to cut-off Valtteri Bottas amidst Mercedes celebration

Toto Wolff appears to cut Valtteri Bottas alleged dissent against Mercedes race strategy in Bahrain, while the team celebrated the win.

Mercedes’ duo had an amazing start to the season, as they bagged P1 and P3 from the Bahrain Grand Prix, despite many believing that maybe this time the Brackley based team is going down.

However, Valtteri Bottas didn’t look satisfied with the team strategy this weekend, as he reportedly termed it “too defensive”. Bottas gave a heads up during Netflix’s Drive To Survive that he would be doing everything to have his shot at the world title.

But such strategies are not suiting his interests in achieving his target. After the race, it seems like Bottas went on to report his grievances to Toto Wolff, but Mercedes’ team principal apparently shut him off while the rest of the team was celebrating the 41 points haul from Bahrain.

Toto Wolff defends the race strategy.

While Mercedes’ crew performance further ridiculed Bottas’s contest in the race, Wolff came onto defend the race plan given to the Finnish race driver by arguing that his team had only limited options.

“I think there wasn’t any strategy on the table,” said Wolff. “Because we tried to undercut also with Valtteri that I think would change the race for him or make his race not.

“The outcome we wouldn’t wish for was that he lost a position at the start of the race, and he kind of couldn’t recover the gap to the two guys in front.

“The pit stop was there to undercut Max, and I think we would probably have been successful, but we had a problem with the right front wheel gun.

“And then I don’t know what other strategy we could have run. The one-stop was clearly not possible. The medium wouldn’t have made it to the end; the hard in the middle stage was running out of performance. There was no other option available.

“I totally understand the frustration in the car when you have limited information and say, ‘I think we could have done something else.’”

Post Edited By: Tanish Chachra
Mercedes Toto Wolff

About the author

Tanish Chachra

Tanish Chachra is the Motorsport editor at The SportsRush. He saw his first race when F1 visited India in 2011, and since then, his romance with the sport has been seasonal until he took up this role in 2020. Reigniting F1's coverage on this site, Tanish has fallen in love with the sport all over again. He loves Kimi Raikkonen and sees a future world champion in Oscar Piastri. Away from us, he loves to snuggle inside his books.

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