Toto Wolff proved he has still not forgiven former Formula 1 race director Michael Masi, four years on from his infamous role in the outcome of the 2021 title race, by labelling the former FIA employee a “lunatic”. In a new interview, the Mercedes chief also said Australian Masi had “destroyed the record of the greatest champion of all time”, referring to his former driver Lewis Hamilton.
The Brit lost out in the climax of what had been a thrilling but also bad-tempered title duel with Max Verstappen over the course of the season. Hamilton led for most of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix finale but everything changed when a late crash saw the safety car deployed.
It looked as though Hamilton would win but Masi rushed to get the safety car back into the pit lane so that the race, and the season, could be ended under racing conditions. Hamilton, on very old tyres, was unable to hold off Verstappen who overtook on the final lap and was crowned World champion for the first time.
Mercedes chief Wolff’s reaction in the team garage to what was happening on track remains one of the defining memories of that hugely controversial ending. The Austrian was seen slamming his headset into a desk after pleading over the radio with Masi: “Michael, this is so not right.”
Wolff referred to that reaction as he told The Telegraph: “I have not experienced the loss of control of a situation since I was a child. There is one lunatic who can basically destroy the record of the greatest champion of all time.”
In the same interview, his wife and chief executive of F1 Academy, Susie Wolff, said of her own response to what unfolded: “It was disbelief. That one person’s decision to interpret the rules, in a way that they had never been interpreted before, could have caused such an outcome. It sat so heavily with me, for a long time afterwards.”
After conducting an internal investigation into what happened, the FIA concluded that the race director’s “human error” had led to that outcome of the race and the title battle, but that Masi had acted in good faith. Still, the Australian was dropped as F1 race director before leaving the governing body altogether, later being named as the chairman of the Supercars commission in his homeland.
Masi also gave an interview in which he said he and his family received death threats in the aftermath of the controversy. He said: “I opened my messages that night to check in with them. I had no idea that I could receive them from people I did not know. But I was wrong – I was confronted with hundreds of messages. I wouldn’t say thousands, but certainly hundreds.
“They were shocking. Racist, abusive, vile, they called me every name under the sun. And there were death threats, people saying they were going to come after me and my family. They kept on coming. Not just on my Facebook but also on my LinkedIn, which is supposed to be a professional platform for business. It was the same type of abuse.”
