Toto Wolff expressed his annoyance at Red Bull’s claims that Kimi Antonelli deliberately allowed McLaren drivers to overtake him at the Qatar Grand Prix.
Antonelli was passed by Oscar Piastri at Turn 1 early in Piastri’s second stint – just before making his own second stop – while he then made a mistake on the penultimate lap that allowed Lando Norris to get through. Both McLaren drivers are locked in a championship battle with Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, and after Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko suggested both were cases of Antonelli deliberately letting the McLarens pass, Wolff angrily refuted the claims.
“Bless him, Helmut,” Wolff said. “This is total nonsense that even blows my mind when I hear it. We are fighting for P2 in the championship, which is important to us; Kimi is fighting for a potential P3. I mean, how brainless can you be to even say something like this?
“And it irritates me, because I’m irritated by the race itself, how it went. I’m irritated by the mistake at the end. I’m irritated by other mistakes. And then I get baffled when I hear such nonsense.”
Wolff was also unhappy with Verstappen’s race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase, as he told his driver over the team radio: “I’m not sure what happened to Antonelli, Max, it looks like he just stopped and let Norris through”. While the pair cleared the air afterward, Wolff said the comments were unnecessary and misinformed.
“The other thing is that, apart from losing the points for our Constructors’ Championship… I spoke to the GP, I saw him, and obviously he was emotional at that moment because they needed a P3. [in Abu Dhabi]I think to win the championship, or a P4, I don’t know, just one position,” he said. “Now they need more.
“I said to him, ‘He just took off, he had a moment in the previous corner and then had less entry speed into that left-hander, accelerated and at that moment, which can happen, he lost the position.’ So with the GP everything is clear. Cleared the air. He said he didn’t see the situation. Why would we do this?
“Why would we even think about interfering with a drivers’ championship? I mean, you really have to check with yourself if you’re seeing ghosts.”
“I said to the GP that there was quite a social media storm going on… And the GP said, ‘Sorry if I caused that, I didn’t see the incident.'”
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