Pascal Wehrlein unloaded a fearsome preliminary rant in the direction of outgoing System E champion Nyck de Vries after a conflict that ended each their races within the Seoul season finale.
“I hope he doesn’t get to F1!” declared Wehrlein over Porsche staff radio, earlier than calling de Vries a “f***ing fool”.
That outburst referenced de Vries’ lengthy operating however most likely slim potentialities of constructing his F1 debut subsequent 12 months.
He has pushed in free follow classes for each Williams and Mercedes this season however is ready to stay in System E for 2023 with a transfer to the Maserati programme that’s taking up the present Venturi staff.
Wehrlein is a former Mercedes protege and F1 take a look at driver himself, who additionally contested 39 grands prix with the Manor and Sauber groups in 2016 and ’17.
His rant about de Vries got here instantly after the pair collided at Flip 1 whereas battling over thirteenth place with Wehrlein stopping in a while the lap and the Mercedes pitting with a minimize tyre and suspension harm.
Wehrlein was unavailable to the media on the finish of the race, as he was required by the stewards. This wasn’t instantly associated to the de Vries conflict.
De Vries was adjudged to be at fault for the accident and obtained a retrospective five-second time penalty regardless of being retired within the storage.
The Race acquired a further blast of criticism for the Mercedes EQ driver from Wehrlein, who described the incident as “not the usual of this championship”.
Solely the tail finish of the conflict was caught by TV cameras.
“To start with, within the first incident he moved underneath braking in Flip 20,” stated Wehrlein.
“I needed to lock all my tyres and virtually crashed and misplaced one or two positions because of that.”
He then retook de Vries, just for the opposite – extra terminal – contact to happen.
“One lap later I feel he took assault mode and the primary doable choice he tried an over-optimistic transfer into Flip 1 – sliding utterly to the exit of the nook, crashing into my automotive, braking the suspension, destroying his race with manner too late braking so he didn’t actually get the nook anymore which isn’t actually comprehensible,” stated Mexico Metropolis E-Prix victor Wehrlein.
“It’s not the usual of this championship. I imply… these strikes!
“Ultimately my race was destroyed, his race was destroyed and he acquired two penalty factors for it, licence factors.
“It’s very often the identical drivers with over-motivated strikes and sadly this time I used to be the sufferer of him.”
De Vries, who retired from the race and slipped to ninth within the drivers’ factors desk, stated that the preliminary incident with Wehrlein, which occurred whereas he was not in assault mode, transpired as a result of he “let him by as a result of I didn’t actually need to combat at that time within the race”.
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He stated he then anticipated extra cooperation from Wehrlein as soon as he was in assault mode.
“After I activated assault mode and acquired as much as the again of him, I form of anticipated the identical form of method to the race and he wished to combat,” added de Vries.
“I had already dedicated and clearly his proper entrance touched my left rear. In the end that’s what resulted within the puncture.”
On listening to that Wehrlein had been essential of him, de Vries merely stated that he “didn’t hear what he stated”.
He added: “What can I say? Everyone seems to be allowed to say what they need to say. Everyone seems to be making an enormous deal of it however I don’t know.”
De Vries and Wehrlein have been criticised by a number of different drivers over the course of the 2022 season, though solely de Vries has obtained a previous penalty for extreme defensive strikes.
The outgoing champion additionally instructed The Race that whereas he was “tremendous, tremendous glad for the staff” and congratulated team-mate and new champion Stoffel Vandoorne “who did an incredible and really constant season”.
However he was additionally candid about his feeling of being “disillusioned in my very own season” given he was unable to defend his title.
“It’s not at all times apparent from the skin, nevertheless it simply turned a little bit of a snowball impact,” stated de Vries.
“There have been so many little issues that at all times form of set in our manner.
“They had been simply sufficient to form of forestall us from executing constant factors, after which generally we took the large ones [wins in Diriyah and Berlin].
“However in the end, yeah, on my facet of the storage, we simply didn’t actually discover our manner after which we had been on the backfoot, and it was only a snowball impact.”