Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff says the possibility of having George Russell and Max Verstappen as team mates wouldn’t faze him.
Wolff indicated he is considering a bid to lure Verstappen away from Red Bull for next year. The world champion is contracted to his current team until 2028.
Russell is out of contract at Mercedes at the end of the year and has therefore faced speculation he might lose his drive to Verstappen. The rivalry between the pair has escalated since the end of last season: Verstappen was incensed by the role Russell played in his penalty in Qatar, the pair collided at the Spanish Grand Prix and Red Bull have brought three unsuccessful protests against the Mercedes driver in the space of two months.
Nonetheless Wolff said he would be willing to entertain the possibility of pairing them as team mates.
“I can imagine every line-up,” he said in Friday’s FIA press conference. “I had Rosberg and Hamilton fighting for a world championship, so everything else afterwards is easy.”
Lewis Hamilton won two world championships as Nico Rosberg’s team mate in 2014 and 2015. Rosberg beat him to the 2016 title, then immediately retired from F1, despite having signed a two-year contract extension with Mercedes.
“There’s pros and cons of having two drivers fighting each other hard,” Wolff added. “We’ve seen examples where that functioned and other examples where it didn’t.”
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Russell said on Thursday that talks to extend his Mercedes contract have been delayed by Wolff’s pursuit of Verstappen. Wolff said he is considering his options but remains confident in his current line up of Russell and rookie Andrea Kimi Antonelli.
“I think we are very transparent in the team for what we do, what we plan, and we’ve been like that since I was put in charge,” said Wolff. “So that’s not the issue.
“At the moment, clearly, you need to explore what’s happening in the future, but it doesn’t change anything of what I said before about George or about Kimi, about the line-up that I’m extremely happy to have.”
Wolff said Russell has “always performed to the expectations that we have set, and he’s continuing to do so.
“We haven’t given him a car to win a world championship in the last three years, so that’s completely on us. And the times the car has been good, he has been winning races […], he’s always there. You know that when he’s getting in the car, he’s going to extract what is in the car.
“Having said that, for whatever reason, in early summer, those kinds of contract discussions start to end up being accelerated in the media or accelerated because of a lack of information. What I have been doing the last 30 years in a normal business, contract discussions are not being held as town halls. So, everything is normal, everything goes to plan.”
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