Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes, Singapore, 2018

Wolff broke radio silence to praise Hamilton’s “epic” lap

RaceFans Round-up

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In the round-up: Toto Wolff says he made the unprecedented move to congratulate Lewis Hamilton over team radio after he stormed to pole in qualifying for the Singapore Grand Prix.

What they say

Wolff came on the radio at the end of qualifying to tell Hamilton: “Lewis this is Toto, this was the most epic lap I’ve ever seen around here.” He explained why he made the rare step of talking on the team’s radio:

Today was teamwork. I think from Lewis’s side, for me, the stardust. The most epic lap I’ve ever seen from him.

I never go on the radio, it’s the first time I went on the radio to him, today. Because I hadn’t seen anything like this before. We knew exactly what split times that car was able to do – sector one, sector two – and when the purple times kept cropping up, it was surreal.

Quotes: Dieter Rencken

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Comment of the day

After a series of recent setbacks in his championship fight with Hamilton, is pressure getting to Sebastian Vettel? @Toiago thinks any pressure on the Ferrari driver may be coming from within:

Just to add something regarding Vettel’s mistakes. I think more than anything else he feels the pressure he puts on himself to emulate Schumacher. He has openly admitted that Schumacher is his idol and he would like to do with Ferrari the same thing Schumacher did, reviving Ferrari from an unsuccessful spell and turning them to contenders again. It hasn’t been easy, since the advantage Mercedes had from the start of 2014 has been huge, and it took a bad year (2016) thrown fully into a new aerodynamic overhaul in the rules (2017) to make Ferrari championship contenders again.

Vettel and Ferrari are such a great fit for each other, and Vettel is no doubt a great driver, so he just has to regroup and do the best job he can. The Leclerc signing could indeed be a bad omen for Vettel, but it could end up being precisely what makes him elevate his game and eliminate the kind of amateurish mistakes he has been making.
@toiago

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Author information

Will Wood
Will has been a RaceFans contributor since 2012 during which time he has covered F1 test sessions, launch events and interviewed drivers. He mainly...

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33 comments on “Wolff broke radio silence to praise Hamilton’s “epic” lap”

  1. Those Kvyat new are a certainty or just rumours?

    1. @johnmilk Yes, still just rumors as no official confirmation has taken place.

      1. Ok. We don’t see that sort of thing atound here unless it is official. So I’m expecting a confirmation soon

        1. TR will announce their drivers in sotchi.. Guess who😇

  2. The fact that they actually use the word “epic” on the team radio and in press statement makes you hope Mercedes-Benz go through a Audi-esque scandal and have to pull all their money from F1 and close down the works team for good.

    1. So thousands of people have to loose their jobs because you don’t like the word ‘epic’? And presumably you think Wolff’s the one without a sense of proportion?!

      1. I have to hope that what Klon is wishing for is meant to be a joke (a rather unfunny joke at that), rather than the sort of nihilistic destruction that he wants, otherwise it is a pretty extreme overreaction.

        Not only does he seem to want to bring misery to all those within the works team, it would also heavily damage both Williams and Force India as well, given the dependency of both of those teams on Mercedes – especially Force India, which, between the joint research group, wind tunnel lease agreement and component supply chain, is pretty interlinked with Mercedes.

        It seems like an extraordinarily petty and callous response to the use of the word “epic”, and one where, if meant intentionally, he either hasn’t thought through the consequences or just doesn’t care what damage he does to those who would be on the receiving end of his treatment.

    2. Dunno, I just watched the onboard and that was an epic, EPIC lap there. And I’m a Ferrari fan.

    3. Klon… RaceFans’ new troll… ;)

    4. Why is epic a four letter word to you?

    5. Agreed with you, the most appropriate word Mercedes should use is… “Gifted”.
      Hamilton was gifted pole due to Max’s engine issue, Vettel’s bad mood causing tyre locked up due to Q2 tyre conflict bla bla bla…

      1. Lol. Must hurt.

        1. LOL! Apparently it’s excruciating. I feel no sympathy: I’ve been an F1 fan a long time & I’ve never been a Ferrari/Schumacher, Red Bull/Vettel or Renault/Alonso fan, but I don’t recall me or any of my friends or family being as worked up over our time in the proverbial wilderness as these brand new “fans” of mainly Verstappen. They act like angry, entitled cult members.

      2. LOL! Apparently it’s excruciating. I feel no sympathy: I’ve been an F1 fan a long time & I’ve never been a Ferrari/Schumacher, Red Bull/Vettel or Renault/Alonso fan, but I don’t recall me or any of my friends or family being as worked up over our time in the proverbial wilderness as these brand new “fans” of mainly Verstappen. They act like angry, entitled cult members.

  3. This isn’t going to be a very popular opinion, particularly given his egg stunt, but I honestly can’t get enough of Ted Kravitz. His notebook feature is both insightful and highly entertaining, he has good rapport with teams and mechanics, and he seems to push the limits of what the teams will accept for the sake of good PR – his escapades remind me of the way Martin Brundle pioneered the grid walk. For me, he is head and shoulders above the likes of Croft and Herbert and I feel he doesn’t get the recognition he deserves. Somebody out there, please back me up!

    1. I love him but that egg stunt was ridiculously stupid. I wasn’t embarrassed as a F1 fan, I was embarrassed as a human being!

    2. I’ll back you up – I don’t expect the average person to walk around knowing that the oil that you “fry” an egg in is way hotter than the 100 degrees limit of water (which takes several minutes to cook an egg in) which is why it’s so quick – but when making a feature I do expect them to google it and tell him…

      However, Ted is great, just endlessly cheerful and insightful – even if the delivery of the knowledge is very conversational – but I think the Sky writers and team are somewhat letting them down for the last few years.

  4. The comments of some F1 posters sometimes defy belief.

  5. Would be interesting to see Hamilton’s lap and Verstappen’s (second?) lap head-to-head to find out where Verstappen lost out. Both laps were mega!

    1. Verstappen would definitely be way much faster around the corners and lose out slightly in the straights.
      Redbull have the outright best handling chassis and downforce levels.

    2. Yes, the Hamilton 2018 vs Vettel 2017 posted on YouTube pretty much useless. People are more interested to compare current rival instead.

  6. ”I never go on the radio, it’s the first time I went on the radio to him” – Yes, you do occasionally following a race win.
    – I agree with both the COTD and the ESPN-article since both of them point out the same thing.
    – I won’t buy the tweet of Jennie Gow nor the Instagram post of ZiggoSportF1 as long as the content of them isn’t officially confirmed, which indeed isn’t the case, so still nothing but rumors.
    – BTW, Next year is when the 10th anniversary of the content of the ”On this day in F1” segment will take place, not yet this year (only the race itself in which it all happened.) Following the previous round-up, I was originally going to not bring this type of thing up again for a little while but decided to do it this one more time for a little while after all.

    1. Wolff wears his heart on his sleeve (for a team manager) and says things that aren’t true if you use the precise definition of those words, but would not be considered untrue if you or I said the exact same thing in the same context to each other in a casual setting – I wouldn’t want him to change – but I wish that people would let people be people and not hold them to unobtainable standards – If you incentivise people to hide their flaws, then hide them they will, and you get to hear a corporate mouthpiece reading a brainstormed script and refusing to deviate. I like hearing the personality of the people in the sport, I think it’s important.

    1. Interesting… do we thing Max can Massa his way past between corners 10 and 13… that would be epic!

  7. I always saw Vettel as the new Schumacher, and his loss to Ricciardo as an anomaly.
    Vettel surely has had some great qualis and races (Toto would say ‘epic’) with Ferrari over the past years. But every time when it started to count he began making mistakes.
    It begins to feel that Vettel’s spell at Ferrari is a bit like Schumacher’s final years at Mercedes.
    It’s a real pity Ferrari and Alonso could not stick it out a few more years to end the title drought for both (maybe not too late).

    1. I suspect that it’s more of a case of the Ferrari not being quite as good as people think it is and that Vettel and Kimi are having to drive their socks off just to compete with the Mercs.

      1. @dbradock

        If you take off this Ferrari tints you’ll see things more clearly.

  8. Hamiltons lap was epic! Faultless. Unexpected and undoutably 1 of the best in recent years… Arguably too for the nay sayers…

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