Toto Wolff has now made peace with the course of the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Max Verstappen won the race then, and his first world title, with ultimately one overtaking move on Lewis Hamilton in the final lap. However, how that last lap came about remains with the Austrian to this day. He can now accept the result, he says now: ‘Max is absolutely a deserved world champion’.
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Going back in time. During the 2021 season, Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton fought fiercely for the world title. The two arrived in Abu Dhabi with exactly the same number of WDC points – 369.5 – where the last race of the season was held. For a long time, it seemed that Hamilton would come out on top, until in the final phase former Williams driver Nicholas Latifi caused a safety car.
The race was restarted – after a controversial decision by then race director Michael Masi – and Verstappen was able to overtake Hamilton in the very last lap to secure his first world title. Toto Wolff’s protest against Masi’s decision – ‘No, Michael, that’s not okay’ – went viral.
In a recent episode of the SAP podcast, Wolff reveals that the pain of the 2021 Abu Dhabi GP ‘still stays with me’. “It was nice to win the eighth constructor’s title (for Mercedes, ed.) because that had never happened before,” he says. “But how Abu Dhabi 2021 itself turned out? That always stays with me.”
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‘Max is a deserved world champion’
Wolff has now come to terms with the result. “I have peace with it now, and so does Lewis,” says the team boss. “Max is absolutely a deserved world champion, and the season is not determined by a single afternoon or evening. But that is what sticks with me most from 2021.”
Why the Mercedes team boss reacted so passionately to the end of the race, Wolff now also knows. “My own reaction was of course… Since my childhood, I have tried to be in control, because I had a difficult childhood. I remember that around the age of eight, nine or ten I already wanted to be independent from my parents and from anyone else, and wanted to make decisions myself,” he explains.
“And that (Abu Dhabi 2021, ed.) was the moment when I felt that everything was decided,” Wolff continues. “Ten laps from the end, or whatever it was, there was no scenario left in which the championship could still be taken away from me. And then it was taken away from me and it was a moment of disbelief. That was my personal feeling.”
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