Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has revealed details of his conversations with former race director Michael Masi before his controversial call in the 2021 championship-decider.

Masi lost his job over his mishandling of the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. He arranged a final-lap restart in contravention of the rules which led Wolff’s driver Lewis Hamilton to lose the championship to Max Verstappen.

Hamilton and Verstappen were involved in a series of controversial collisions over the course of 2021. Wolff, who previously called Masi “disrespectful” and a “liability”, said he had concerns over how the race director reacted to feedback from the drivers.

“I really tried to speak to Michael and guide him all along the year,” Wolff told High Performance. “I said ‘listen I’ve been in the sport for a long time, listen to the drivers, don’t always be stubborn in your decision making, don’t be arrogant’.”

Wolff admitted his motivation in speaking to the race director was partly to advance Mercedes’ interest.

“I tried that for the good of the sport, and obviously also for us as a team not to be vulnerable to situations that could be totally detrimental,” he said.

Masi contradicted the regulations and his past interpretation of them by arranging a final-lap restart at Yas Marina by removing the lapped cars between Hamilton and Verstappen, but not any of the others. The FIA later ruled this had been an error. Verstappen passed Hamilton immediately after the restart, clinching his first world championship and denying Hamilton a record-breaking eighth.

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Wolff said Masi’s actions were “inexcusable.”

“You could say the empathy should make me realise how he feels,” he said. “I realise how it feels.

“And I know that’s not good, and bad, but he could have thought about it all year long, when people, not only me, tried to support him in the right way.

“So sometimes you have to just realise that someone is just doing his own thing or taking his own decisions. So for me, I don’t care about it anymore.”

However he admitted he still reflects on the lost championship “every week”.

“I mainly think about it because I think Lewis deserved to be the greatest of all time with eight world championship titles,” he said. “And you can argue all along about that year.

“I think Max and Lewis were deserving champions. There were instances during the year where Max lost some points that he shouldn’t have lost. You look at the crash in Monza both of them had. So both deserving champions, but on that particular afternoon in Abu Dhabi, it was unfair.”

Following his departure from F1, Masi joined SRO Motorsports Australia last week as head of sporting operations.

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