Hamilton was furious after Mercedes decided to keep him on five-lap medium tires during the final safety car at Zandvoort, leaving him exposed to Verstappen, who had stopped to fit a fresh set of softs.
Things turned against Hamilton when his teammate George Russell, who had not initially entered and stayed behind him, also pitstoped for new soft tyres.
After being unable to hold off Max Verstappen at the restart and falling into the clutches of Russell, Hamilton took it out on his team.
“Guys, or can I believe you screwed me over,” he said over the team radio. “I can’t describe how pissed off I am right now.”
After being asked by the team at the end of the race to say what he had to say in private, Hamilton apologized for speaking in such a way, saying the emotion of the moment had gotten to him.
But Toto Wolff doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with Hamilton’s reaction, believing teams need to understand that it’s inevitable that their drivers will vent when things go wrong.
“You get excited, I do too in the race,” Wolff said. “And when you’re a driver inside the car, it just comes out of you. You can’t even stop it.”
“We are the rubbish bin, the vomit bag, and we take all of that with us because we need it. That’s how the relationship between a frustrated driver and the pit wall has always been.”
Wolff said things quickly calmed down with Lewis Hamilton after the race as they went over strategy options and explained to him why the team believed gambling on victory was better than simply taking second place.
“We have sat down together and we have discussed the race strategy,” he said. “It was something that in the morning we had decided to risk.”
“It really backfired. I think in general the circumstances, having Max behind him and everything, it was totally unpleasant. But there are more positive things to take away. And that is what we have also talked about: that the car is faster”.
Wolff also says it’s inevitable that when a team splits its strategy between its two drivers because it’s not sure which is better, the loser will get angry.
“It’s tremendously difficult to make the right decision and especially if you have two drivers competing against each other.
“We’ve been like this for 10 years: one is going to be angry and the other is going to be happy. And those are the ups and downs that we need, in a way, to balance and recognize that the frustration on one side is always great.”
Speaking about his feelings during the radio chat at the Dutch GP, Hamilton said it had been triggered by seeing that he had missed out on a possible victory.
“I knew at that moment that I had lost it, before the restart, when I knew that everyone behind me was on the soft tyre,” he said. “I knew it was done. There was no way to keep them behind me.”
“I don’t apologize for my passion because that’s the way I’m made, and I don’t always do it right. But I apologize to my team for what I said, because it was in the heat of the moment.”
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