Mercedes boss Toto Wolff says Formula 1 teams must realise they are sometimes used as "vomit bags" for frustrated drivers, following Lewis Hamilton's Dutch Grand Prix outburst. During the Valtteri Bottas-inspired safety car at Zandvoort, leader Hamilton did not change tyres to a set of Soft Pirelli's as Max Verstappen and George Russell both did. This proved the wrong decision as Hamilton was quickly gobbled up on the restart, and was eventually passed by Verstappen, Russell and Charles Leclerc to finish fourth. The seven-time world champion told his team that they had "f*cking screwed me" and that he was "pissed" with them for the blunder. However, post-race Wolff was understanding of the situation.
F1 teams are vomit bags - Wolff
"You get emotional, I do too in the race," Wolff explained to media including RacingNews365.com. "When you are a driver in the car, it just comes out of you - you can't even stop it. "We're the trash bin, the vomit bag - and we are taking that because we need to. "This is how it has always been in a relationship between frustrated driver and the pitwall. "We have sat together and discussed the race strategy. It was something that we decided to take a risk. "It really backfired for him. But I think overall the circumstances having Max behind him and stuff that was totally unpleasant. But there's more positives to take. And this is what we have also chatted about: the car is faster."
Hamilton does not need to shoulder blame
Wolff also ruled out Hamilton taking the blame for not demanding a switch to Soft tyres himself as Russell had done - given he had a gap to both Verstappen and the sister Mercedes in which to make a stop. "The pitwall and strategists try to calculate probabilities and come up with the best possible decisions, and the pitwall will call us and say: 'this is what's happening, or what we should do', but it all came so quickly. "So for us it was so tremendously difficult to really make the right judgement call, and especially if you have two drivers competing against each other also there. "We had 10 years of one is going to be upset and the other is going to be very happy - and that's the swings that in a way we need not to digest, but acknowledge that they frustration on one side is always big."
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