Racing
© Liauzh
Toto Wolff says Mercedes will keep letting Kimi Antonelli and George Russell race each other after their bruising Canadian Grand Prix weekend, but warned he would “not be a millimetre hesitant in putting the handbrake on” if their fight starts threatening team points or pushing too close to a double retirement.
The Mercedes team principal made clear Canada brought the pair close to the limit of what the team is prepared to tolerate. He pointed to Antonelli’s lock-up behind Russell before the final chicane in Sunday’s race as one moment that “could have ended up in a double DNF,” and said Mercedes now needs to study the footage with both drivers to decide whether some situations were “a little bit too close.”
That warning followed one of Mercedes’ fiercest intra-team fights in years at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. The tension began in Saturday’s Sprint, when Antonelli and Russell battled for the lead, made light contact at Turn 1 on lap six, and Antonelli later ran off again and lost second place to Lando Norris. Their duel continued in the grand prix until lap 30, when Russell retired with a battery failure.
Wolff said the concern is not only the risk of the two cars taking each other out. He also believes the fight can carry a heavy performance cost. In Canada, Mercedes had enough pace to absorb it, but he said “when they were fighting we were losing a second to all the others,” because battling disrupts braking, acceleration, and energy harvesting and deployment.
That means Mercedes’ hands-off approach is not unconditional. Wolff said the team wants the drivers to reach their own conclusions after reviewing the race, and to understand which situations should be avoided. “There’s so much at stake for both. There’s so much at stake that you have to, as a team, as uncomfortable as the ride is sometimes, you have to accept that this is the fight they’ve been trained for,” he said. “But equally if there was a situation where we believe the team’s points are at risk of being lost, or there was a situation where we were losing so much time to our competitors behind, then we would not be a millimetre hesitant in putting the handbrake on.”
Mercedes did issue a warning from the pit wall during the race. On lap 26, Russell’s race engineer Marcus Dudley told him: “Too close at the moment this is. Just information, if we can’t tidy up the racing, then we will have to stop it.” Wolff later described that as a notice that the pair were “on watch,” rather than an order to stop racing immediately.
For now, though, Mercedes is still backing open competition between its drivers. Wolff has said he wants to let “the guys race” for as long as possible, even if the ride is uncomfortable from the pit wall.
Canada mattered because it showed the Mercedes title fight is no longer a theory. Wolff said “this fight is on,” and Antonelli left Montreal with his fourth straight grand prix win and a 43-point championship lead over Russell, giving Mercedes every reason to protect the battle without letting it damage a championship campaign that is rapidly turning into an internal duel.