‘Lewis suspected a conspiracy’ – Nico Rosberg explains how Lewis Hamilton F1 rivalry went awry at Mercedes
When Lewis Hamilton joined Nico Rosberg at Mercedes for the 2013 Formula 1 season, it was a feel-good story: two long-time friends becoming team-mates.
However, their amicable relationship soon turned sour, as Mercedes dominated the world championship’s early turbo hybrid era from 2014 and title battles turned into intra-team duels.
The first signs of tension appeared early, and in the 2014 Belgian Grand Prix, the pair collided on lap two as Rosberg attacked Hamilton around the outside of Les Combes, with his front wing clipping his team-mate’s rear-left wheel; they both suffered damage and lost victory to Daniel Ricciardo.
“It’s not a single event, it’s a continuation of a negative spiral of becoming enemies internally,” Rosberg told the Beyond The Grid podcast. “It’s really a step-by-step process. Of course, there’s spikes on the way, but it just linearly gets worse and worse and worse with these big spikes in between. That’s just the process.”
The tension was palpable in the grandstands too. “It ended [Hamilton’s] race, so it’s very consequential – and all eyes on us, it’s just the two of us fighting for those race wins and the championship, so it’s very consequential,” Rosberg added.
“The whole world then debates it and it all comes crashing in, and all the Lewis fans start booing. That’s also very difficult to experience, when you get a lot of fans booing you, which started there in Spa. That’s really difficult, mentally, to manage. To have so much hate against you, it’s tough.”
Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes
Photo by: Clive Mason / Getty Images
As the intra-team rivalry became deleterious, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff took a drastic, unforeseen decision ahead of the 2016 season: to swap mechanics and engineers around.
“That was tough,” Rosberg reminisced. “It was just because things were deteriorating internally.
“It was really starting to build a proper wall in between the two cars, because the mechanics started to also compete, and the engineers start to compete, and when you start to see that, and maybe some pieces of information are not shared in the most open way anymore as they used to be, because the mechanics also want their car to win, and the engineers want their car to. They’re super competitive, they want their driver to be champion.
“It’s not healthy for a team when you start to not share information properly, you’re not a real team anymore, then things can go bad very quickly.
“Toto was aware of this, so he did such an extreme chop that came in so hard without any warning to anybody and then switched our mechanics over – and my mechanics are my family. So I come into the garage, Melbourne, Friday free practice, and my family is on Lewis’ car. So I’m thinking they must have put my car on the other side for some reason, I look at the car number – it’s Lewis’ car. So I’m like, ‘What on earth is going on here?’
“And they’re my enemies, Lewis’ mechanics. I’m saying it more extremely, but they want Lewis to win, not me, so – not my enemies, but they’re my rivals. My rivals are on my car, fixing the last bolt and putting me out on the race track. That was really weird.”
Interestingly, Rosberg had won the last three grands prix of the 2015 season, and the overhaul did not prevent him from clinching victory in the opening four rounds of 2016 – achieving a seven-strong victory streak which not even Hamilton has ever achieved.
Nico Rosberg, Mercedes
Photo by: Saeed Khan / AFP via Getty Images
“Fortunately though for me, I adapted really quickly,” Rosberg said. “It became my new family, or my extended family, so that worked really well.
“Lewis struggled more. Every time something would not go his way, he would think straight away a little bit ‘conspiracy’ or things like that. So he struggled a little bit more with that initially and kind of shot himself a little bit in the foot with that in the first part of the season, because obviously everybody was always treated equally to the extent possible.”
Wolff’s decision did not avert further drama, with two high-profile collisions between Rosberg and Hamilton in 2016; the German went on to narrowly clinch his maiden F1 title – and his only one, as he announced his retirement five days later.
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