Toto Wolff has rubbished claims from the wider public that he reacted positively to Nico Rosberg’s off-track excursion that paved the way for Lewis Hamilton to take victory at Monza.
As Hamilton took the race lead from Rosberg after the latter’s second trip through the escape road television images showed Wolff smiling soon after the event’s occurance.
Cynics, including three-time world champion Sir Jackie Stewart, went on to speculate that this was down to Rosberg giving up the race lead and serving as punishment for responsibility in his collision with Hamilton at Spa.
When the matter was brought up, the Mercedes Motorsport boss angrily hit back at such theories, saying that the pictures of him were captured prior to Rosberg’s off-track excursion.
“Whoever picks that up and tries to interpret anything in such a picture must be out of his mind,” Wolff said, “First of all, it’s not live. It wasn’t synchronised with the picture.”
Wolff believes that only one with “a paranoid mind could come up with such an idea.
“I think there was lots of pressure on Nico because Lewis was so quick yesterday and you could see that today as well,” he added.
Wolff also had to face questions posed to him regarding the radio messages relayed between Hamilton and his race engineer, whose advice to Hamilton to preserve his tyres was seemingly ignored by Hamilton as the latter continued his pursuit for Rosberg immediately afterwards.
“Not all communication is being broadcast,” the Austrian replied.
“After the pit stop, the message was ‘I think we should save the tyres on both cars and take it to the end and let them fight at the end’.
“But we changed the opinion because there was clearly a possibility for the driver who was following to overtake at the beginning of the stint and the end of the stint.
“So we came back with the message to the drivers that they were free to use whatever modes were available. It was according to plan.”
