Ever since I came to Formula 1, even in my Williams days, I’ve tried to be the most balanced and the most structured, the most transparent, I’m sorry, the most balanced and the most transparent with the drivers. I’ve told this story before. I remember being a teenager and running into Alain Prost on the grid and I said ‘just out of curiosity, why did you and Senna go wrong?’ And he said, “Because we never knew what the team was. One time you felt like you were the flavor of the month, then two months later you thought the politics were against you. There were different situations where you really felt like you were unwanted.” So I always took it as a challenge to balance.
And it wasn’t easy with Lewis and Nico [Rosberg] back in the day. And so people can think what they want, but honesty in that respect is something that is important to me and the drivers know that. We have Kimi since he was 11 years old. He is an integral part of the team. It’s great to see him grow, to be in a position now where he’s fighting for a championship at such a young age, the talent he has. And on the other hand, George, who has been with us since the age of 17, whose emotions and compassion I feel a lot, how can I say. We are very close.
We spend time with Carmen [Montero Mundt, Russell’s fiancée] and Suzi went astray with each other. If people see that we travel together, drink coffee at the same coffee shop, go to the gym, so it’s pretty annoying that some crazy person who has no idea how relationships work makes such accusations. So I don’t care about it.
The most important thing is that George knows what the team is like and Kim knows it and we will always try to give them equal opportunities. And when it comes to improvement, this is a good example. We don’t know which one will be faster. So you make a decision and say, “Let’s try to learn.” And there is no great political thinking behind it. And when it comes to a competition like Papaya Rules, we’ve always made it very clear that we don’t stand in each other’s way. We don’t like yo-yo racing that can cost us position if someone is close to us, and the faster car will always have the advantage if they are behind. And it can go either way, it doesn’t matter.
Even if it were now more realistic for someone to win the championship with sheer mathematical probability, we’d still give George the same odds. And this is important. That’s the ethos and integrity that the team has operated by since I arrived in 2013, and we’ll stick to that.
Then people can think what they want.