– How close were Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg to being fired at Mercedes? According to Mercedes motorsport boss Toto Wolff, very close – and he had actually suspended the two squabblers once during the 2016 Formula 1 season, as he reveals in an interview with The Athletic.
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The trigger was the internal team collisions between the two drivers, whose friendship had turned into a bitter enmity during their years together at Mercedes. “You represent the Mercedes brand, and you just have to accept that it’s not all about you,” says Wolff.
“The fact is: they are competitors. We accept competition. We accept that they race against each other as long as they respect certain red lines. And that is very simple: don’t crash into each other.”
But that happened in 2016 – and several times at that. After Rosberg had won the first four races of the season, his streak was ended by a collision with Hamilton in the first lap of the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona, which opened the door to victory for Max Verstappen in his first race for Red Bull.
Wolff: “So I fired them”
A few weeks later in Austria, there was contact again in the final lap during the battle for victory, in which Rosberg’s car was damaged, causing him to drop back to fourth place. Wolff had had enough.
“So I fired them,” he says plainly. “I called my CEO Dieter Zetsche (at the Mercedes-Benz automotive group; editor’s note) and said: ‘Listen, you have to sign something here.'”
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“He called me back and asked: ‘You’re suspending both drivers?’ And I said: ‘Yes, because otherwise they won’t understand how important the interest of the brand and the team is compared to their own.'”
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“It was their personal rivalry that took over,” Wolff continues. “A healthy competition became a rivalry and finally hostility. And that is simply something I would not allow in the organization. Because of these factors, we sent them an email and said: ‘At the moment, you are not part of the team.'”
Lecture and final warning
On Wednesday, he then called both drivers and told them to appear in his office the next day. “I said: ‘My problem is that I don’t know who was to blame.’ Because it’s nuanced. Like everything in life, it’s never 100 percent wrong. It can be 50-50. It could be 51-49. Or 70-30. And I can’t judge that.”
“So I told them that one has to go if it happens again – and I might make a mistake in the process. Maybe I’ll send the wrong one away.”
The Austrian gave them a lecture: “‘The people in the factories who have to pay off their mortgages – what do they think? That you two crash into each other because you don’t like each other? That directly affects the lives of two and a half thousand people. Who do you think you are?’ That is an important insight that you have to share with your drivers.”
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In the end, both drivers were allowed to keep their cockpits, and there were no more collisions on the track. At the end of the season, Rosberg secured his first world championship title and subsequently retired.
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