Mercedes boss Wolff drops Rosberg bombshell
Year after year reporters look forward to ‘stories’ at annual F1 breakfast meeting
Local journalists covering the Canadian Grand Prix look forward to their annual breakfast meeting with Mercedes motorsport boss Toto Wolff, and with good reason: The guy has a way getting himself into trouble.
And the best part is he knows it all too well.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll give you some juicy anecdotes,” he said mischievously to the reporters gathered around the table in the Mercedes paddock at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.
He might as well have been rubbing his hands.
The 45-year-old Austrian with the Arnold Schwarzenegger accent and fast smile seems to revel in making the right, and even wrong, kinds of headlines, probably because he’s smart enough to know that both are good for the promotion of Formula One.
At last year’s breakfast, Wolff got himself into boiling water when he characterized Montrealborn Lance Stroll — now a rookie with the Williams team — as more mature than Red Bull driver Max Verstappen when the fellow teen entered F1 in 2014.
“Ah yes, that caused some trouble, no?,” Wolff recalled. “When I said that Lance was more mature than Max? Helmut Marko loved it,” he said, referring to the head of Red Bull’s driver development program.
This weekend, Wolff dropped a wowzer about his former driver, Nico Rosberg, who shocked the F1 world when he announced his retirement soon after winning the drivers’ championship last year.
Trouble is, even when he says he’s only speculating, you never know whether there might be something more behind his pronouncements.
In any case, this time around, Wolff began by striking a serious, almost sombre tone when speaking about Rosberg, who for four years was Lewis Hamilton’s teammate at Mercedes.
“I think that when he took the decision to retire it was because it was just too much. It was a very stressful year — very stressful years against probably the best driver in Formula One,” Wolff said. “And he felt at that stage exhausted. That’s how he appeared to me.”
Then noting that Rosberg is only 31 years old, Wolff took a long pause, looked around the table and added: “I wouldn’t be surprised if he changed his mind in a year and reappears in a Ferrari.” Ka-boom!
Rosberg at Ferrari?
In the place of whom? Certainly not Sebastian Vettel, who represents the scuderia’s best hope of returning to championship glory after going 10 years without a drivers’ title.
That leaves Kimi Raikkonen, whose contract, as it happens, expires at the end of this season.
Raikkonen, who, as it happens, won that last title at Ferrari in 2007.
The room exploded — seemingly to Wolff’s delight.
“You see,” he said, “every year I give you one.”
After the dust settled, he was asked whether this was just a hunch, or a rumour in the paddocks, or what.
“What’s a hunch?” Wolff asked, apparently unfamiliar with the word though his spoken English is excellent and his storytelling abilities are worthy of a standup comic.
A hunch is a gut feeling, he was told, an instinct.
Another long pause.
“No, I just want to create some stories,” he said, to much laughter.
And yet, it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?