Toto Wolff seems increasingly convinced that he wants to bring Max Verstappen to Mercedes. THE bustles who accompanied the Austrian team in this first part of the season could be exploited by Wolff for his purposes. On the other hand, the manager of the German team is well aware of which buttons to press in these political games. In fact, behind the performance of the cars, there may also be other details on which to leverage.
Wolff would like to see Verstappen wear silver
Red Bull still remains the team to beat, there's no doubt. This year, however, something has changed compared to the domination inflicted on the opponents in the last two years. The other teams, naturally, did not remain idle. Their improvements are making us witness a more balanced and more exciting season. Who knows, however, whether the decline in performance of the two Red Bull cars is not also due to other factors of a anything but sporting nature. The Austrian team, up until the start of the championship, represented a perfect set of mechanisms, with results that we all admired. But, at a certain point, this beautiful game of gears stopped turning as usual, slowing down the entire Red Bull system.
In the space of two months Christian Horner was engulfed by a sex scandal, Adrian Newey decided to leave the team after eighteen years and, as if that wasn't enough, the political struggle within the team doesn't seem to have subsided. Fight that sees Horner himself on one side, while Jos Verstappen and Helmut Marko on the other. Despite this confusion and although the gap with the other teams has significantly decreased, Max Verstappen has carried the team on his shoulders, proving immune to any type of pressure deriving from non-sporting problems. THE values of the Dutchman were certainly not in doubt, but today they shine more than ever, especially in the eyes of Toto Wolff. In fact, the Mercedes manager seems increasingly intent on replacing the void left by Lewis Hamilton with another world champion.
Toto Wolff chooses to put pressure on the Horner case
Although Verstappen has made it known to the media in recent weeks that his desire is to continue at least another year in Red Bull, Toto Wolff seems not to have given up on the idea of having him in the team with him. And here the Austrian manager of Mercedes is trying to move the negotiation to an extra-sporting level, putting pressure on the already fragile balance at Red Bull. To do this, Wolff is trying to appear close to Jos Verstappen and Helmut Marko, obviously to the detriment of Horner. This led Wolff to make some particular statements to the Kleine Zeitung: “Jos Verstappen and I have always had a great report. With Marko I felt good privately in recent years".
Not only that, Toto Wolff has decided to focus further on what happened at the beginning of the year regarding the Horner case, releasing a bitter judgment on how the matter was handled at the top levels of the team: “I thought Oliver Mintzlaff was hired to run the company with a hard fist. But it is clear that decisions are made elsewhere”. Finally, the final blow referring to Marko: “I see he was impressed by his team it no longer has the identity it once had”. Time, the only one that will tell us if this type of pressure exerted by Toto Wolff will have had the desired effects.
To date, however, Max Verstappen remains a Red Bull driver, as he should be next year. Unfortunately for Mercedes.
SOURCE STATEMENTS: Formulapassion.it
