Toto Wolff and Lewis Hamilton 'think every day' about controversial 2021 Max Verstappen title defeat

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has revealed that he and Lewis Hamilton continue to think about the controversial 2021 season finale "every day."

The season-ending 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix is one of the most controversial races in F1 history, with Hamilton having lost the drivers’ title to Max Verstappen.

Hamilton was comfortably leading the race at the Yas Marina Circuit and looked set to claim an unprecedented eighth world title before a late crash for Williams’ Nicholas Latifi changed everything.

A safety car was deployed to clear Latifi's wreckage, bringing Verstappen back onto Hamilton’s gearbox and on much fresher tyres after pitting for softs — while Hamilton was on incredibly old hard tyres.

Had the rules been followed, the race would have concluded behind the safety car, which would have crowned Hamilton as champion.

However, race director at the time, Michael Masi, opted to allow only the lapped cars between Hamilton and Verstappen to un-lap themselves on the penultimate lap, before restarting the race with just the final lap remaining.

Based on the regulations, either all lapped cars or no lapped cars can be allowed past, while the safety car is supposed to do one further lap once lapped drivers have passed. This would have been the final lap.

In the end, Verstappen overtook Hamilton on the last lap at Turn 5 to secure his first of four drivers’ titles. It remains a day Wolff and Hamilton still speak about, and it remains at the forefront of their memory.

Speaking before the São Paulo GP, Wolff was asked by The Telegraph when he had gotten over the 2021 season finale, saying: "We haven’t got over it. I talked to Lewis about it yesterday — I think about it every day and so does he. And it’s stayed with the team, too.

"Both were deserving champions, but the referee made a bad call, to use a football analogy, and you can’t reverse it. The goal has been scored, the game is finished."

The conversation Wolff and Horner never had

Since losing the 2021 title, Hamilton has not been involved in a title fight, while it marked the start of Verstappen's period of dominance before he lost the 2025 crown to Lando Norris.

It was not only Hamilton and Verstappen who formed a rivalry, with Wolff and former Red Bull boss Christian Horner going head-to-head on several occasions.

According to Wolff, Horner has to this day never acknowledged to him that what happened in the 2021 finale was not right, pinning it as a "gap in his personality."

Discussing whether Horner had ever admitted to him that what happened on the final lap was wrong, Wolff revealed: "Never. He was never able to admit it.

"I try to look at it from the other side – and from their point of view, they deserved to be world champions, they had had some incidents that were unfair to them throughout the season, and the outcome of that race is a fair representation of the performance levels during the season.

"But Christian was never able to admit the same – that if it was the other way round and had happened to them that day, it would have been catastrophic, and he would have come up with all kinds of insults. And I think that the ability to be introspective or able to see the other side with some compassion is a total gap in his personality.

"It’s the sense of entitlement he has. And that bit him in the end, because he felt entitled to all the power, and Red Bull didn’t want to give him that power."