Toto Wolff vented his annoyance at Red Bull claims that Kimi Antonelli intentionally allowed McLaren drivers to overtake him in the Qatar Grand Prix.
Antonelli was passed by Oscar Piastri into Turn 1 early in Piastri’s second stint – just prior to making his own second stop – while he then made a mistake on the penultimate lap that allowed Lando Norris to get through. After Helmut Marko suggested both occasions were Antonelli letting the drivers by amid a title fight against Max Verstappen, Wolff angrily refuted the claims.
“Bless him, Helmut,” Wolff said. “This is total utter nonsense that blows my mind even to hear that. We’re fighting for P2 in the championship, which is important for us; Kimi’s fighting for a potential P3. I mean, how brainless can you be to even say something like this?
“And it annoys me, because I’m annoyed with the race itself, how it went. I’m annoyed with the mistake at the end. I’m annoyed with other mistakes. And then hearing such nonsense blows my mind.”
Wolff was also unhappy at Verstappen’s race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase for telling his driver over team radio: “Not sure what happened to Antonelli, Max, looks like he just pulled over and let Norris through”. While the pair cleared the air afterwards, Wolff says the comments were unnecessary and misinformed.
“The other thing is that, beyond losing the points for our constructors’ championships… I spoke to GP, I saw him, and obviously, he was emotional in that moment, because they needed a P3 [in Abu Dhabi], I guess, to win the championship, or a P4, I don’t know, but one position. Now, they need more.
“I said to him, ‘He just went off, he had a bit of a moment in the previous corner, and then had less entry speed into that left-hander, put the gas down, and at that moment, which can happen, that lost the position’. So with GP, everything’s clear. Cleared the air. He said he didn’t see the situation. Why would we do this?
“Why would we even think about interfering in a driver championship? I mean, you really need to check yourself, whether you see ghosts.
“I said to GP that there’s quite a social media storm … And GP said, ‘sorry if I caused that, I didn’t see the incident.’”
