Toto Wolff says its normal for a team to be a trash bin or a "vomit bag" for a driver overcome with an angry emotion in the heat of the moment, as was the case for Lewis Hamilton in Sunday's Dutch Grand Prix.
Mercedes' decision to split its strategies during the last safety car period at Zandvoort, by pitting George Russell and leaving Hamilton out on track left the latter holding the bag.
On the race's restart, the seven-time world champion was overhauled for the lead in short order by Max Verstappen, after which Hamilton also lost out to Russell and to Ferrari's Charles Leclerc in the laps that followed.
As he fell from first to fourth, Hamilton's anger only grew, and he lost it: "I can’t believe you guys fucking screwed me, man," he lashed over his team's radio. "I can’t tell you how pissed I am right now."
©Mercedes
When all was said and done, and the dust had settled, Hamilton apologized to his team. And Wolff - a man known to destroy the odd pair of earphones when things fall apart – took no offence at his driver's rage.
"You get emotional, I do too in the race," said Wolff. "And when you're a driver in the car, it just comes out of you. You can't even stop it.
"We're the trash bin, the vomit bag in the airplane, and we're taking all that because we need to. This is how it has always been in a relationship between a frustrated driver and the pit wall."
Wolff said that much calmer spirits prevailed during Mercedes' post-race debrief, where all decisions - right or wrong - were reviewed and justified.
"We have sat together and we discussed the race strategy," he said. "It was something that this morning we decided to take a risk.
"It really backfired for him. I think overall the circumstances, I think having Max behind him and things like that, that was totally unpleasant.
"But there's more positives to take. And this is what we have also chatted about: that the car is faster."
Wolff admitted that when a team hedges its bets, its unavoidable for one driver to be happy while the other will give his team an earful.
"It is so tremendously difficult to really make the right judgement call and especially if you have two drivers that are competing against each other also there," he said.
"We have had 10 years of this: one is going to be upset and the other one is going to be happy. And that's the swings that we need to, in a way, balance out and just acknowledge that the frustration on one side is always big."
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