so what is interesting in what happened in the escalating conflict between lewis and nico is that it divided the garage. toto found himself in a situation where the engineers, team personnel and mechanics were being pitted against one another as much as lewis and nico were, hence the infamous whole side swap. engineers were refusing to share data with the other side of the garage etc. literally mercedes was tearing itself apart and devolving into tribalism over whether they were with nico or with lewis. the last thing you want is the team trying to get one over on itself and that's a very scary thing to be at the helm of. you have to trust your personnel completely or things can not only get illegal (in both a sporting and an actual law sense) very quickly, but they can also get dangerous very quickly. you can't avoid a rivalry between people who are legitimately competing but race engineers shouldn't be coming to blows that's absolutely bonkers. i think toto was eager to diffuse any allegations of sabotage or preferential upgrading etc. before the whole garage went up like a barrel of gunpowder. the faintest whiff of something stinking would have been enough. i honestly don't think toto would have had time to gaslight anyone on purpose, he was busy running around with a fire extinguisher.

now i don't want to imply here that george is being purposefully sabotaged - i don't think we have the data to back up that kind of allegation, and i'm not sure who it would actually serve to do that within mercedes. but i do see a difference in rhetoric between toto talking to kimi and toto talking to george, and i find it interesting that the real place this is having an effect is george's relationship with his engineers. if the driver can't trust that the technical team are being open and honest with them, then it limits the driver's ability to respond to a problem, or press an advantage, or weigh up a risky move. and likewise it limits their ability to give useful technical feedback that might improve the car. driving a wedge between george and the wider mercedes team is a truly baffling thing to do on purpose, unless you're trying to pressure him to leave. without any evidence that this is toto's aim here, one has to assume that it's carelessness, or possibly a reaction to a growing fear that the garage is once again becoming divided.

ultimately i think toto's a control freak. which is not a strange thing to be if you're team principal of a formula one team, and makes sense as a learned response to someone who got the baptism of fire of managing brocedes as his first driver pairing. he has a stick and carrot approach to handling drivers, which works well with rookies and junior drivers who aren't totally secure in their careers, but is the kind of strategy that breaks down the longer a driver is with the team and the more emotionally mature a person is. toto also has an obvious preference for a distinct 1-2 driver pairing because it makes for much easier management when there are clearly defined rules and expectations. the problem is that it's really difficult to enforce that when no one is a world champion or a rookie as how you define that 1-2 gets thrown up in the air and becomes even more complicated when a few races in both drivers are still real championship contenders. george has grown out of toto's driver management style but it still works on kimi, for now, i think. in this way toto has ceased to be helpful to george because he's unable to adapt to george's more mature mindset.

WHAT A SHOCK WHEN THEY TELL YOU IT WON'T HURT AND YOU ALMOST TURN INSIDE OUT WHEN THEY BEGIN.