Wolff reveals “I’m sorry” text from Vowles as Williams adds to Mercedes’ woes in Monaco

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has revealed a text exchange during the Monaco Grand Prix with Williams counterpart James Vowles who apologised for his drivers backing up George Russell and Andrea Kimi Antonelli.

Wolff and Vowles are good friends, with the latter have worked under Wolff at Mercedes before taking the top job at Williams, where he has already started an overhaul of the team’s fortunes.

With cars mandated to stop twice during the Monaco GP for the first time in a move introduced to spice up the racing, it left teams on wildly different strategies, with Williams duo Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon taking it in turns to back up the Mercedes pair behind them.

This allowed the other Williams to build enough of a gap to pit and still come out ahead, with the strategy working perfectly for the Grove team, who can now toast four successive races with a double-points finish with, Albon taking ninth and Sainz in 10th.

Having had his arm around Vowles during the team principal’s press conference here on Friday, Wolff revealed the pair had exchanged messages during the race.

“He sent me a text in the race,” he said, when asked by Autosport he would talk to Vowles about the tactic. “’I’m sorry.’ We had no choice given what happened ahead. I answered, ‘We know.’

“James is one of my guys, and I don’t want to sound patronising because he’s making a career as a team principal, and he’s doing really well.

“He had to do it. You know, it’s two cars in the points, and I think the way it started was these RBs that packed us back off, and that’s what we had to do.”

Speaking to F1TV during the race, Vowles said the decision was not how he wanted to go racing, with Mercedes frustrations boiling over when Russell passed Albon by skipping the Nouvelle Chicane – earning the Briton a drive-through penalty as a result.

Russell had already said his weekend was “over” after an electrical issue in qualifying left him 14th, just one place ahead of Antonelli, who crashed out during Q1 with Wolff admitting the poor Saturday had left Mercedes behind the 8-ball in the race.

“There were teams that were punching above their weight, like the Racing Bulls, and they had to protect their position, as well as the Williams, and we were probably one of the victims of that. But we were, because our Saturday didn’t go well,” he said.

“We had a fast car. Kimi touched the barrier, and that’s absolutely on for a rookie. And with George we just ran out of power out of nowhere. It was a car that was good for the first two rows. or better.

“And then we raced on the fun part of the track. Where we were, there was just, there was not any land.

“I think the amount of back off was catching him [Russell] and Kimi out. I think Kimi was the one who nearly crashed into one of the Williams’ on braking. You think about 5.5 seconds slower also then this becomes a different track, different braking points.

“With George, same situation. Difficult to stop the car, just going straight, and I think it was a moment of frustration to do something different. We knew that it was a stop and go, we were hoping it would be 10 seconds. But it didn’t change anything.”

George Russell, Mercedes, Carlos Sainz, Williams

Photo by: Peter Fox / Getty Images

Wolff, who suggested further Monaco-specific changes may be required to truly alter how much action there is during a grand prix, also refuted any suggestions Mercedes made an error with its own calls on strategy.

With a handful of cars pitting at the end of lap one and others being able to pit and come out into clean air, both Russell and Antonelli stayed out, seemingly in the forlorn hope that a red flag or safety car could have an impact.

“We had quite an interesting discussion this morning on strategy, and I said, ‘well, let’s do that. Stop early, come out, and then catch up’. So we did [it in] the DTM back in the day, it was fantastic,” he said.

“You stopped, you were last and you won the race. But the more intelligent people in our strategy group demonstrated to me that that’s not going to work here in Monaco. It was the best strategy, and you can see the ones that did the early stop, and it didn’t change anything.”