Wolff Reveals New Reason Behind Hamilton's Decision To Let Russell Pass Him

Wednesday, 10 April 2024 at 21:15

Updated at Thursday, 11 April 2024 at 10:50

Toto Wolff revealed a new reason for Lewis Hamilton's offer to let George Russell pass him during the most recent race in Japan.

Lewis Hamilton let his teammate George Russell pass him on lap 13 of the 2024 Japanese Grand Prix after starting two positions higher up the grid.

Not only did the seven-time World Champion do it willingly, but he was also the one to offer it and ask his team on the radio whether he should let his younger teammate through.

This is a very rare thing in Formula 1, and even the seven-time World Champion didn't do the same thing in 2023 when he defended Russell as hard as he could, almost resulting in their collision.

However, this time around, he told the media after the race that he felt as if he had picked up some damage from Charles Leclerc, who overtook him in the opening laps.

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As a consequence of the damage, Hamilton said he had a big understeer and felt he was slower, which he proposed was the reason for the offer to his teammate.

But when Toto Wolff was asked about the surprising offer from the 39-year-old, he revealed it would have been because of the experiments with setup.

"There's an easy explanation behind it. Lewis again also we experimented on some things on his car and it looked like there was much worse degradation because of that on the front axle."

It sounds strange that Hamilton would want to experiment because he said after the second practice session that he didn't want to make too many changes to his car as he was happy with its balance. Wolff added:

"That's why he said, 'I'm going to let him pass', because it's testing, like I say. And that was extremely fair play."

It wasn't like he was giving up a position for a podium, it was really trying to understand why wasn't he fast at that stage and that was clearly because we were doing something to the car which we wanted to try."