‘The bullet can’t go back in the rifle’ after FIA investigation – Wolff

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In the round-up: The FIA’s investigation into him and and his wife did “great damage”, says Toto Wolff

In brief

FIA’s short-lived investigation did “great damage” – Wolff

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said an investigation into him and his wife Susie which the FIA opened and quickly dropped last year is “not what you expect from the world of F1 in general.” The FIA announced last month it was looking into whether confidential information had been exchanged between an F1 team principal and a member of Formula One Management, then two days later declared no investigation was taking place.

“The investigation opened and closed in two days has caused great damage,” Wolff told La Gazzetta dello Sport. “If we want to make sport more and more professional, we must try to bring transparency where there is none and establish standards of the highest possible level.

“My position is this. I can’t speak for Susie but she is someone who doesn’t give up, she has a steely determination. It’s not the first time she has faced difficulties, and she will get to the bottom of every court. If one types ‘Susie Wolff’ on the web today, the investigation comes out as the first news: the bullet came from the rifle and can no longer go back inside.”

Newey ‘surprised’ by domination

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Red Bull chief technology officer Adrian Newey admits he is surprised by his team’s dominance in recent seasons.

Red Bull’s cars, designed by Newey, have won 38 of 44 grands prix in the two seasons since the ground effect regulations revolution in 2022. However, Newer admits he did not expect the RB19 to be as dominant as it was.

“It’s a complete surprise,” Newey told Top Gear. “For the ’22 season we had the biggest regulation change on the chassis side since 1983, in terms of going back to venturi cars.

“We thought as we headed into the second year, with almost no regulation change over the winter and us running what is in effect an evolution car, that our advantage would be diminished, if not eradicated. Clearly that’s not how it’s panned out.”

RB20 rebrand wide of the mark

A report by a publication owned by Red Bull claiming they will rename their new car for the 2024 season in honour of Dietrich Mateschitz was retracted yesterday. SpeedWeek claimed the successor to the dominant RB19 will be called the DM01 as a mark of respect for their founder, who died in October 2022.

However the story was subsequently edited to remove references to the new name and social media posts referring to it were deleted. The article now refers to the car instead as the RB20, the same name Red Bull is using for it on social media.

Red Bull has been approached for comment.

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Comment of the day

What would you like to see added to the official F1 game? Rather than historic cars or tracks as DLC, why not, as Martin suggests, an entire game dedicated to historic F1?

What I would love to see – and I have no idea if it’s possible licensing wise – is a proper historic F1 game, rather than a couple of tacked on cars and tracks. Why not have a separate ‘F1 1980s’ game, with the cars and tracks from that era, but using the same game engine as F1 2024? You could even have the TV-broadcast style graphics from that era. Then in a couple of years, do a 1990s one, a 1970s one, a 2000s one, etc. Or, for that matter, sell each historic year as paid-for DLC.
Martin

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to Dave and Daniel Martinez!

On this day in motorsport

Heikki Kovalainen, Lewis Hamilton, McLaren MP4-24 launch, 2009
McLaren’s MP4-24 was a dud when it hit the track but they eventually honed it into a race-winner

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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19 comments on “‘The bullet can’t go back in the rifle’ after FIA investigation – Wolff”

  1. Profile Photo

    Armchair Expert (@armchairexpert)
    16th January 2024, 4:06

    Do you know what I see as the first news, when I search for “Michael Masi”? “I received death threats after the last race of 2021”. Yet not only I didn’t see any support for Masi from Mercedes and Hamilton, whose fans were authors of such threaths, but despite being the faces of “Drive It Out” and “We Race as One” campaigns, Toto Wolff, Mercedes team principal, called Masi “an idiot”, futher enabling hate and abuse.

    1. MichaelN
      16th January 2024, 14:27

      Yeah, but Wolff and Hamilton went to meet Masi in Australia last year to talk about everything that had happened. Oh wait, no, they publicly refused to even speak with him. Even though it was well known what kind of nonsense their fans heaped on Masi.

      Anyway, it’s ironic that Wolff now wants transparency, when that very transparency led to the FIA’s little preliminary investigation even being known. With a little less transparency, such things would be kept under wraps unless there was something more substantial going on.

      1. amped
        16th January 2024, 19:41

        Toto was only more than too happy to sit down for lunch with Michael just days before the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix to advise Mikey on how to do his job (Toto’s own admission), no doubt to ensure Mikey did what he had to do to make Toto happy.

    2. Profile Photo

      Michael (@freelittlebirds)
      16th January 2024, 16:02

      @armchairexpert

      Yet not only I didn’t see any support for Masi from Mercedes and Hamilton, whose fans were authors of such threaths, but despite being the faces of “Drive It Out” and “We Race as One” campaigns, Toto Wolff, Mercedes team principal, called Masi “an idiot”, futher enabling hate and abuse.

      Not sure I follow here. Did Ferrari offer support for Ron Dennis after Spygate where McLaren was rightly punished?
      Did Felipe Massa offer his support for Briatore in Crashgate where Briatore was rightly punished?

      Masi gave away the most hotly contested championship to another team breaking the rules while Wolff kept explaining that it’s not fair and Todt (the FIA president) was 100% behind that with a farcical season where Hamilton was lucky to get away with his life. No punishment, no bans, no nothing, a lot of diagonal crashing off track by Max pretty much anytime Lewis was around…

      Not starting anything but I’m still trying to recover from that so I’m sure Mercedes are all in therapy and we can forget F1 for the next 5 seasons. Technically, Masi change the results for F1 for 5-6 seasons. He certainly is more influential to Red Bull’s success than Horner, Marko, or Verstappen. The only person more influential may be Newey. It’s a coin toss between Newey and Masi as Red Bull’s best employee of all time.

      1. Ludewig
        18th January 2024, 9:57

        The more dangerous crash was when Lewis refused to give room to Max, causing the two to collide. But pretty much none of your comments are factual or sensible.

    3. Profile Photo

      MadMax (@madmax)
      16th January 2024, 18:25

      armchair hate

  2. Profile Photo

    GT Racer (@gt-racer)
    16th January 2024, 5:34

    A stumbling block with a historic F1 game is how you need to work out licensing deals with each individual car, driver & circuit.

    With the modern games FOM own the rights to everythings so your doing one deal with F1 and getting the rights to all the cars, drivers, circuits, tv graphics etc..

    There’s also the need to spin up another development team as the team working on the modern game team wouldn’t be able to work on a second one.

    Back when Codemasters were independent and had a few teams working on various projects simultaneously maybe they would do it. But under EA Codemasters are i believe basically just 3 teams now, The official F1 game, Official WRC game & the 3rd is working on Need For Speed with additional people helping across projects.

    It is however actually possible that a completely different publisher (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Ubisoft etc..) could create a historic F1 game just as Papyrus did with Grand Prix Legends. They just wouldn’t be able to use F1 branding but would be able to include real cars, drivers and circuits from a given season if they did the licensing deals for them again like Papyrus did with GPL.

    Until then however we are reliant on unofficial fan MODs for the various PC sims.

    1. Profile Photo

      Red Andy (@red-andy)
      16th January 2024, 6:44

      Presumably it would also be possible to licence and produce a selection of cars and circuits from different eras, like Codemasters did with the Dirt Rally games, even if it doesn’t form a complete grid from any particular season.

    2. Profile Photo

      Martin (@f1hornet)
      16th January 2024, 16:30

      How far back would FOM’s rights go though? I wonder if they could still license, say, the 1990s or 2000s wholesale? I mean they were licensing F1 games back then, so presumably FOM (or its predecessors) had the rights then. Of course it could be that whatever image rights they had with the drivers and teams from that time could have expired.

  3. Profile Photo

    Jere (@jerejj)
    16th January 2024, 11:12

    I could’ve expected Red Bull Racing or another England-based team for Permane, but not an Italian one.

    Regarding Alpine tweet: I did little Googling after noticing he also has the Slovakian flag colors on the belt area, yet I couldn’t find any reference pointing towards dual-nationality, so slightly confusing.

  4. Mayrton
    16th January 2024, 15:30

    The question remains why FIA dropped the investigation. All talk from Wolff is irrelevant as he is a party in this. Even a 10 year old can see the unethical situation at hand.

    1. grat
      16th January 2024, 16:19

      Well, it’s good to know you’re more likely to believe Bernie E’s shill starting a baseless rumor, than you are a multi-billion dollar international racing organization.

    2. Moi
      16th January 2024, 16:41

      The FIA opening an investigation was not the problem. If FIA has cause to open an investigation, they can simply do so, then take their time investigating whether there is anything to it.

      The problem, and their mistake, was making a public statement about starting the investigation, instead of doing so in silence and only going public if there were enough findings to justify follow-up steps.

      I feel Wollf & co actually might have gotten lucky – in handling it the way they did, FIA enabled them to cause such a stink that FIA was forced to prematurely drop an investigation which otherwise might very well have caused major problems for Wolff.

    3. MichaelN
      16th January 2024, 17:35

      The question remains why FIA dropped the investigation.

      Because at the end of the day, any real or potential conflict of interest involving Formula Academy is – like that series – not important insofar as it relates to F1. What special information could Mrs. Wolff possibly learn about? Is Stefano Domenicali, to the extent that he’s even calling the shots, discussing confidential schemes about the commercial and/or technical future of F1 with officials in a small-time support series? Not very likely. Not likely at all.

      The FIA had to respond to media speculation because it involved the integrity of its F1 series. That’s what mattered, that’s where the money is. Not some F4 series. And I’m sure folks at the FIA also got a chuckle out of it, given the prior antics of Mr. Wolff. But that’s all there is to it. The completely over the top reaction from the Wolffs was a lot more suspicious than any of the initial speculation, but again; nothing about Formula Academy really matters to F1, so there’s no reason for anyone, least of all the FIA, to make more of this.

      1. Tristan
        16th January 2024, 21:10

        Completely agree with this. Especially the bit about the reaction.

      2. Profile Photo

        Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine)
        16th January 2024, 21:33

        The FIA had to respond to media speculation because it involved the integrity of its F1 series.

        I disagree completely. I read the article which started the whole thing (unbylined, always a tell) and didn’t think it was credible enough to put in the round-up. And that’s a much lower bar than commencing an investigation and declaring it publicly. The fact other sites regurgitated what was in the article without adding anything to it did not lend extra credibility to it.

        1. amped
          16th January 2024, 21:48

          It needs remembering Keith, that people working for credible outlets did reach out to contacts and confirmed the claims made by BusinessF1 that Toto let slip he knew something in a meeting he shouldn’t have known, so it was not entirely baseless. They didn’t just regurgitate it. This appears to have been forgotten and overshadowed by the attempt to pass the whole issue off as a misogynistic attack, despite Toto being the target…

          Nor is it the first time Toto has gotten himself into a discussion about this either.

        2. Tristan
          16th January 2024, 22:43

          And that’s a much lower bar than commencing an investigation and declaring it publicly

          Is it though? I remember reading through these laws during the Stroll investigation and if I remember right the FIA has a duty to do investigate these things. Isn’t it good thing that the FIA would investigate any claim? An investigation doesn’t imply any level of guilt and the speed at which it was concluded should signify how little there was to it.

          I find it suspicious that the Wolff’s are so defensive about merely being investigated… There’s a bit of Shakespeare to it.

  5. Profile Photo

    MurasamaRA300 (@murasamara300)
    18th January 2024, 9:10

    While I agree fully with COTD, may I also like to remind people that Grand Prix Legends and Rfactor (with mods) still exist and are still good

    The GPL & RF communities are driven by enthusiasm rather than billion-dollar investments and demands for soulless “return on investment”. Just saying.

    You can also search Youtube for “Spa 1970 is Automoblista 2’s Best Yet!” [sic] (on the excellent GPLaps channel and I’m not getting paid to write this) for one alternative.

Comments are closed.