During the team’s terrible weekend in Brazil, George Russell and Lewis Hamilton engaged in fascinating radio conversations with their respective Mercedes race engineers.
Toto Wolff said that Mercedes’s real problems at the Brazilian Grand Prix were “a complete sideshow” compared to the radio antics.
George Russell was trailing his teammate when he was forced to retire, while Lewis Hamilton finished the race in eighth place. Wolff subsequently stated that, in the team’s 13-year existence, this past weekend was the worst.
However, the Grand Prix got off to a positive start. After a restart, Fernando Alonso overtook Hamilton, causing one Mercedes to trail the other while the other drivers made up ground with strong starts off the line.
This gave them the chance to collaborate with each other. Russell was displeased when Hamilton moved out of DRS range, leaving him vulnerable to the lurking Sergio Perez, who managed to get past both of them, despite his explicit declaration that he would not attack his teammate and that they should pool their efforts.
Furthermore, when race engineer Ricardo Musconi asked Russell to manage his tires on the seventeenth lap, his attitude did not get any better. “Do you want me to give up ground or race? He shot back, “I will go backwards with more management.”
And he was even less pleased when, toward the end of the race, he found himself perched on the slower-moving Hamilton’s gearbox, fuming that they had not received an order to swap places. His sarcastic message was, “I haven’t been on the radio because I thought it was quite obvious about the pace.”
The seven-time world champion laughed when his driver was later instructed to “use the tyres now” by race engineer Pete Bonnington. He then retorted, “I have been for the last five laps, dude,” obviously frustrated by their slow pace and degrading tires.
The Mercedes cars were performing so badly that Wolff was not giving much thought to the friction between his drivers on the radio. When asked about it following the race, he made it apparent that he currently has other priorities.
“I think the race [management] and the messages for us today are completely irrelevant,” said the Austrian. “There was nothing to manage or nothing to say, it’s a complete sideshow. I think the fundamental issue is that the car was slow.
“So I’ve no problem with things being broadcasted or not because whether it’s controversial or not, fundamentally, if there’s no performance like that and it’s off, then who cares?”
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