Mercedes team principal suspects Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu dropped Esteban Ocon to protect his team from criticism.

Ocon has been backed by Mercedes during his career and became the team’s reserve driver when he lost his seat at Racing Point in 2019.

Haas stunned the paddock by dropping Ocon one week ago during the Mexican Grand Prix weekend. Ocon, who was already due to leave the team at the end of the season, argued with his race engineer Laura Mueller during the second practice session about the team’s choice of tyre strategy for him.

Neither Haas nor Ocon has confirmed the reason for the split. However Wolff suggested Ocon’s comments may have been a factor.

“I think at the end it came to the point where Ayao needed to represent the team and protect the team from certain rhetoric,” he said. “And on the other side, Esteban felt personally that he wasn’t wrong in the things he said.

“You’ve got to respect that at the end, the team calls the shots. The team principal needs to decide when it’s enough, and that is what Ayao did.”

Ocon has lagged behind team mate Oliver Bearman in the points all season. Following the first race of the season Ocon suggested there were differences between the team’s cars. Bearman later confirmed there had been inconsistency between the performance of Haas’ chassis during the season.

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Ocon made his F1 debut at the Belgian Grand Prix 10 years ago thanks to the efforts of Wolff, former Mercedes junior team chief Gwen Lagrue and Frederic Vasseur, who is now team principal at Ferrari.

“At Mercedes we picked up the management of Esteban, due to Gwen, actually. That’s how we got to know Gwen when Gravity defaulted and then agreed to work with Fred in GP3, the championship together.

“Then there wasn’t really an opportunity in Formula 1. Then [we chose] the DTM, we did that together.

“Then, I don’t know if that is actually known, when suddenly there appeared to be a free seat in Manor from Spa onwards, it needed two million dollars, and we were saying we can provide one million for that seat, but we were missing one million. Fred put the money in personally to give Esteban the opportunity.”

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