Toto Wolff has revealed that he knew Lewis Hamilton was about to leave Mercedes F1 when he received a call from Carlos Sainz Sr. Indeed, the latter warned the Brackley team principal that his son was going get pushed aside so that Hamilton becomes Charles Leclerc’s new teammate.
The Austrian reveals that Sainz Senior called him around two weeks before Hamilton’s contract was signed, and that he then heard from other drivers’ relatives what was going on. As he had already revealed, it was when Fred Vasseur did not respond to his calls that he was surprised by the situation.
“I heard the bells ringing two weeks ago” Wolff said. “Yes, Father Sainz called me and said, this is what’s happening. And then there were a few fathers of pilots who called me even though they hadn’t done so before.”
“So I said to myself that something was happening. So I sent a message to Fred Vasseur, the boss of Ferrari, to say ‘are you taking our driver?’ I didn’t get a response. It’s very unusual from Fred. He’s a good friend. So yes, I saw it coming.”
Wolff then brought up the subject of Ferrari when Hamilton came to his house, as he does every year: “When Lewis came into the house, as he had done so many years before, we had a little chat, as we always do around the Christmas holidays.”
“Then I said ‘we’re recruiting at Ferrari now. We have this guy.’ And Lewis said ‘there’s something I need to tell you’ and yeah, when he said that, the first thing was to tell me that it was actually happening.”
Belgium
