Yahoo Autos Mercedes' Toto Wolff Blasts Dangerous 'Lunatic’ Conspiracy Theorists, Tells them to 'Take a Shrink'
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff is blasting “lunatics” who have peddled theories that the squad is deliberately sabotaging its departing seven-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton.
Hamilton will leave Mercedes at the end of the current campaign for Ferrari, and the Briton has so far endured an underwhelming season, having trailed George Russell at the majority of the Grands Prix.
An anonymous email was sent to Formula 1 personnel after the last race in Canada, purporting to be from a Mercedes team member, claiming that Mercedes was taking underhand actions that could threaten Hamilton’s safety.
Concurrently there were also several messages and threads on social media alleging that Hamilton was not receiving favorable treatment by Mercedes.
Wolff has given such accusations short shrift and says that the email is being investigated at a police level.
“It is not from a member of the team, when we are getting these kinds of emails, and we are getting tons of them, it is upsetting particularly when someone is talking about death and all these things,” Wolff said. “On this particular one I have instructed to go full force with police inquiring it, researching the IP address, researching the phone number, because online abuse in that way needs to stop. People can’t hide behind their phones, or their computers, and abuse teams or drivers in a way like this.
“I don’t know what some of the conspiracy theorists, lunatics, think out there. Lewis was part of the team for 12 years, we have a friendship, we trust each other, we want to win…and end this on a high and celebrate the relationship. And if you don’t believe all of that, then you can believe we want to win the constructors world championship and that is by making both cars win. To all of these mad people out there, take (see) a shrink.”
Wolff’s stance was backed by Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur.
“How you could imagine that the company with 1,500 people working night and day, pushing like hell to bring upgrades and for, it’s not enough, but when you’re bringing upgrades for each race, that we could kill one of our car or damage one of our car that this is completely irrational and nobody in the paddock could do something like this,” Vasseur said.
“We are fighting for the championship. Each weekend we are trying to score one point more than the other one, how could imagine that we say, ‘OK, that Lewis, we don’t want to score points anymore with you,’ this for me, it’s completely irrational.”
