Wolff Shares One Regret Over Verstappen 2021 Silverstone Crash

Monday, 11 November 2024 at 12:55

Max Verstappen at the post-qualifying press conference during the 2024 Singapore Grand Prix weekend, with a purple background.

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff revealed what he regrets not doing after the crash between Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone in 2021.

Max Verstappen's crash on the first lap of the 2021 British Grand Prix still remains one of the biggest in recent F1 history. After contact with Lewis Hamilton, the Dutchman flew into the wall on the outside of the turn number 9 (called "Copse").

The force at the impact as the triple World Champion hit the barriers was 51G. Fortunately, Verstappen was okay. What the Red Bull Racing driver and his camp didn't like was how Mercedes behaved in this situation.

Verstappen's Championship rival, Hamilton, got a ten-second penalty but still went on to win the race, and the whole Mercedes team celebrated without any sort of apology or acknowledgment of the fact that the 39-year-old's collision took the Dutchman out of the race and sent him to hospital.

Looking back at 2021, the Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff suggested on a recent episode of High-Performance podcast that there is one thing he would have changed:

"It ended up in a situation that, thankfully, Max wasn't hurt. I said before, I could have reacted in a better way, because I heard from one of the Red Bull engineers that he was fine in that respect. That was 'tick the box Max is fine,' and we went on to win the race, and he didn't score."

Verstappen revealed this year that he did suffer some health problems after the crash at Silverstone, and he struggled with blurry vision for the rest of the 2021 season. However, that was kept secret until this year. Wolff continued:

"So that was important to bounce back in the championship. I felt the driving at times was not clean, and in retrospect, I should have just picked up the phone and called Jos and said, 'Is he fine?'"

"Now, Jos clearly would have told me what he was thinking about that situation but that's fine. But I should have, as a father, called the father of the driver and said, just asked [if he was okay], and I didn't."

"Now we cleared the air on that one, and there were many more instances in that particular year that were not to the standards that we all expect from each other."