“The instructions are not clear enough”
Nico Rosberg knows a thing or two about racing Lewis Hamilton wheel to wheel in sister Formula 1 cars.
The pair were team-mates for four years at Mercedes with an intense rivalry, and now Hamilton competes for Ferrari alongside Charles Leclerc – which has become tense at times, amid disagreements over team orders and on-track clashes.
Hamilton ended up in the gravel at the start in Monza, while on lap one in Mexico they both went off the track while battling for the lead, paving the way for Max Verstappen to snatch victory away from the Scuderia.
While team principal Fred Vasseur sternly expressed his frustration, Rosberg doesn’t reckon the Scuderia has been handling the issue particularly well.
Speaking about the 2016 Monaco Grand Prix, when he let title rival Hamilton through to chase Daniel Ricciardo for victory, Rosberg explained Mercedes had instilled the right conditions for healthier cooperation between team-mates.
“It was very easy, because Toto [Wolff] and the team did a very good job clarifying the team racing guidelines,” the 2016 world champion told the Beyond The Grid podcast. “It’s very clear: if the team is looking to lose the race win, then the moment comes when you need to drive as a team and not anymore as championship rivals. It was very clear.
“In Monaco, I was not going well because my visor was so fogged up I couldn’t see where I was going. I was very slow, Ricciardo was disappearing in the distance, so it was very clear there was a threat that we’re losing the win here. So it’s very clear then you need to drive as a team and Lewis needs to have a shot at it, so wave him past.
Nico Rosberg, Mercedes AMG F1 W07 Hybrid
Photo by: Mercedes AMG
“That was super painful, but it’s not so bad when the instructions are clear beforehand, and that’s so important, that the instructions are clear beforehand, which is something that Ferrari for example is not doing well enough at the moment in F1, because the instructions are not clear enough, and then you get this arguing between the drivers. It just needs to be clear.
“Also, we didn’t do it perfectly at the time either. We did in this case, but what we didn’t do perfectly was wheel-to-wheel battles. You can never be enough into details as to wheel-to-wheel battles to make it very clear who’s at fault when, and we didn’t go into details enough.
“We tried, we were quite well advanced in printing our own rulebook for wheel-to-wheel battles, but it was not detailed enough, and there was always ambiguity, every single time – also because Lewis is so damn smart in wheel-to-wheel racing, so it was never 100% his fault, and sometimes it would be 100% my fault.”
Discounting instances where they ‘merely’ pushed each other off the track, Hamilton and Rosberg actually collided on three occasions during their time at the team – the 2014 Belgian GP and the 2016 Spanish and Austrian GP. Victory eluded them twice then.
Mercedes did eventually implement a simple rule to deter them from unnecessarily clashing: they would have to share the cost of any collision between the Silver Arrows – which Rosberg says cost him $360,000 on one occasion.
The German explained Mercedes F1 non-executive chairman Niki Lauda had played a big role in maintaining a level of harmony between him and Hamilton.
Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes AMG F1 W07 Hybrid and Nico Rosberg, Mercedes AMG F1 W07 Hybrid collide on the opening lap
Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images
“Paddy [Lowe, executive director] is a risk-averse person,” Rosberg detailed. “He tries to avoid confrontation as a human, so not ideal to have him managing such a post-incident discussion, because he would take, very often, the easiest path – not like go into it properly, confronting us, he would choose the path of least resistance, which is not ideal.
“It was better when Toto and Niki got involved. Niki got involved quite a few times; he was a great mediator, because we all appreciated him.
“He was very good at getting each of us to own a little bit of it at least, and that brought us closer. When it wasn’t just 100% the other guy’s fault, Niki would get both of us to [say], ‘Yeah OK, that part I agree, maybe that was a bit too late that I closed the door’. And then Lewis would say, ‘Yeah, I agree, I went too crazy aggressive on the grass’, or whatever.
“That kind of started to move us together and to a way that we could then sit us together and say, ‘OK, let’s try and move on from this’.”
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