Peter Windsor's 'Mercedes sabotaging Lewis Hamilton' claims are complete nonsense

'Lewis Hamilton sabotaged by Mercedes' is a comment that has been thrown around far too often these days. The latest addition to this was Peter Windsor in a podcast appearance, where he addressed the 'sabotage' allegations.

Unlike a common theme in F1 fandom recently where Mercedes has been accused of sabotaging Lewis Hamilton's strategy, Peter Windsor took a slight detour. One of the more prominent voices in F1, Windsor said that Toto Wolff sabotaged Hamilton when he decided to replace Valtteri Bottas with George Russell.

What the F1 pundit alludes to is that Mercedes had Lewis Hamilton as the #1 driver in the team. Bringing in a young upstart who is going to fight with Hamilton for supremacy is not the best approach as it has played a role in the current team dynamics.

However, Peter Windsor's argument makes no sense whatsoever because, to answer this question, we have to take things into context. Most importantly, we have to understand why Toto Wolff took the call to promote George Russell and replace Valtteri Bottas.

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If Lewis Hamilton had won his 8th title in 2021, he would have retired soon after

What fans (and possibly Peter Windsor himself) forget is that Mercedes in 2021 was at a crossroads. Nobody knew how long Lewis Hamilton would continue to race in F1. He'd achieved everything there was to achieve. There was only one milestone that was left and it was the 8th world title.

Looking at Mercedes form that season, the 8th title was certainly not out of the question. That's something that could possibly have been achieved in 2021.

Had Hamilton achieved that, he would have statistically been head and shoulders above everyone else. At that stage, there wasn't much left for him to achieve. At that stage, would anybody have been surprised if Lewis Hamilton had walked away from the sport? Probably not.

An untimely exit from F1 would have blindsided Mercedes (just like the team was blindsided by Hamilton leaving for Ferrari). Toto Wolff was looking at a situation where his star driver already had a foot out of the door, and hence the Austrian had to think ahead.

George Russell was a driver invested heavily into by Mercedes

George Russell is a driver that Toto Wolff got hold of very early in his career. The British driver had been a Wolff prodigy for years by the time 2021 rolled in. Not only that, the fact that Russell had to spend an extra season driving the backmarker Williams even though he performed admirably in 2020 was something of a sticking point as well.

George Russell would not have spent a fourth season in Williams in 2022. He was either getting a drive at Mercedes or moving to a rival midfield team. After investing as much as Wolff did in Russell, he would not have been willing to just let him go. That's where, seemingly, the decision was made, and George Russell got the much-needed promotion.

Mercedes had to future-proof its line-up

Valtteri Bottas had been part of Mercedes since 2017. The Finnish driver did the job as the able second driver. At no point, however, was he ever going to take over from Lewis Hamilton within the team. If Toto Wolff had not replaced Bottas with Russell and all of a sudden Hamilton decided to retire or leave the team (both were possible after the kind of success he had), Mercedes would have Bottas in one of the cars.

Now that's not the kind of line-up a title-contending team would want. We can see this in 2024 that even though Lewis Hamilton is leaving Mercedes, the team has George Russell, who is consistently outperforming the 7x champion in the same car.

Conclusion

While it is easy to say now that Mercedes could have easily continued with the same lineup, the context is important. If Lewis Hamilton left Mercedes in 2024 and Toto Wolff had lost George Russell to a rival already, the German team would have been in a whole lot of trouble.

If we look at the team's interests, the right decision was made, even though Peter Windsor might have been off the mark on this one.