🚨 | Toto Wolff afirma ter Kimi Antonelli como filho italiano:
“O Kimi é um filho italiano. Um garoto de 20 anos que parece ter 16, porque é um menino italiano. Ele só queria estar em um ambiente de família.“
“Ele entra em modo corrida, em um transe. Às vezes você fala com ele pelo rádio e ele nem ouve, porque está dentro desse transe. É quase como se ele precisasse se recalibrar: o Kimi voltou ao planeta Terra.”
@MercedesAMGF1
care to explain why you manually HID my comment on Instagram?😂
it's not under the main comment section,
and it's also not under the "hidden by Instagram" comment section,
= you hid my comment. why?
my educated guess = hiding all mentions of deployment issues
@MercedesAMGF1
care to explain why you manually HID my comment on Instagram?😂
it's not under the main comment section,
and it's also not under the "hidden by Instagram" comment section,
= you hid my comment. why?
my educated guess = hiding all mentions of deployment issues
Let's be blunt.
First, given that it was already clear you couldn't catch P1 on a track where overtaking is hard, and considering the front-running GR was on old white tires while the latter, AKA, was on nearly fresh reds (comparable to other teams' red tire life), there should have been no team order to swap positions. Because the best possible result for the team would still have been P2 and P3. The easier move was to let AKA get within 1 second of GR, activate overtake mode, and then run a train. Since there was no chance of being faster and chasing down P1 anyway, why swap at all?
Second, even though GR didn't understand it, he followed the team order. But after the swap, and with the team explicitly telling AKA to give GR overtake mode, AKA just floored it and drove off, leaving GR on old whites to fend off a whole train of cars behind on fresh reds. That's basically abandoning him. So why keep giving the green light to someone who repeatedly ignores team orders?
At the end of the day, on one hand AKA is untrustworthy, and on the other, the team is deliberately trying to manufacture a golden boy.
About saving George’s race ❌
About saving ANT’s position ✅
🔻If GR could defend HAM on older hard tyres, he could defend ANT too. Unless Mercedes believed ANT could simply pass him on the straight — which raises another question: has Mercedes still not fixed GR’s straight-line speed?
🔻Maybe you can call the swap “for the team,” but saying it was about “saving GR’s race” makes no sense.
Without the swap, there were basically four possibilities:
① ANT couldn’t hold off HAM.
ANT had fresher tyres, so he could at least fight HAM and cost him time and tyres before HAM reached GR. Even a P2/P4 would have been better for GR’s championship.
② ANT held HAM off.
Mercedes still gets P2/P3, exactly the same team result, while GR keeps P2 — better for his championship.
③ Neither ANT nor GR could hold HAM off.
Then Mercedes could end up P3/P4 or worse. But this argument only works if Mercedes believed ANT, despite having fresher tyres, had little chance of defending HAM. If so, “protecting the team result” at least makes some sense.
④ GR and ANT fought for the position and it ended in contact.
After Canada — where ANT repeatedly ended up in the gravel while fighting GR and kept asking the team over the radio to report his own teammate — maybe Mercedes thought avoiding another heated intra-team fight was safer. That would be understandable, but it still wouldn’t be about “saving GR’s race.”
What actually happened? Mercedes swapped them, then cancelled the instruction for ANT to give GR a tow, leaving GR on older hard tyres to deal with HAM. Afterwards, they admitted they hadn’t expected GR to keep the podium anyway.
So “for GR” simply doesn’t add up. And “for the team” only works if Mercedes believed ANT couldn’t defend HAM or that letting the two race was too risky.
What Mercedes clearly prioritised was securing P2 for ANT.
🔻Some people say “ANT was P2 anyway, GR was just giving the position back.”
But the first VSC had already benefited ANT. He was slow on his third stint on hards. GR had also struggled on his second set, but after using his own feedback to ask Marcus for a front-wing adjustment on the third set, he became around 0.4s faster than ANT.
Had ANT stayed out, he could have faced pressure from a faster GR and the Ferraris. Instead, he pitted for softs under the VSC — what Toto called a “free pit stop.”
So ANT got the benefit of a free stop and didn’t have to fight GR on track to regain P2, because Mercedes simply had GR give the position back.
The pit stop may have been “free” for ANT, but the whole thing wasn’t.
Someone still paid the price. That someone was George.
@MercedesAMGF1@akkodis_global Correction: George was running in P3 before ANT pitted. Lewis always needed to pit one last time, VSC or not. Stop rewriting the story to look like George never deserved his podium place and it wasn’t a sacrifice to throw him to the wolves.
@MercedesAMGF1@akkodis_global Defending for twenty-year-old toddler again😭so why did't you give George overtake? Why didn't you let George pit under the VSC? Why George's top speed is much slower than Antonelli's even they both drive W17?
You keep telling everyone it's 'team first'. Forget what Toto says – look at what they do. I see zero team interest from Mercedes – only the personal interest of 12. This was purely about securing P2 for him. We had P2 and P3 in the bag, but they deliberately mapped out a plan to drop George to P4 or P5 just so 12 could get that second place. George put on a masterclass, holding off much newer softs on old hards – but that doesn't make it okay for the team to throw him under the bus for a teammate's selfish benefit.
@MercedesAMGF1 stupid pr. leaving George to the two Ferrari with new tire and didn't give him any tow or overtake. The ugly face of the privileged few👎