Toto Wolff has revealed that Mercedes “would go as far” as giving Lewis Hamilton or Nico Rosberg a race ban should they fail to abide by the revised rules of engagement.
After reviewing their final-lap clash in Austria, the German manufacturer said its two drivers “remain free to race”, though it added “much greater deterrents to contact”. Wolff refused to elaborate on Thursday before the British Grand Prix and initially kept his stance when talking to Sky Sports at the end of FP1.
“We did not want to go into detail because it’s almost like a contract and you don’t want to reveal any financial terms of any agreements and it’s a little bit like that here” he said.
“I don’t want to be the headmaster “I don’t want to slap anybody on the wrist because drivers are the stars of the show, they are the gladiators. We have to lift them up, not push them down.”
But when it was suggested to him that the reigning Contructors’ champions would never “leave Lewis Hamilton on the sofa” with a race ban, the Mercedes motorsport boss added: “If we left Lewis at home, it’d mean the system that we created three years ago of letting the drivers race has failed.
“It is a failure for all of us, it’s a failure… mostly from the drivers. It’s their responsibility because none of us can grab the steering wheel in the cockpit.
“Then obviously [this would mean that] having two equal drivers in the car racing each other does not function. Would we go as far? Yes, we would go as far to make sure that it does not happen in the future anymore. That’s 100% clear.
“We are a massive organisation and one of the best brands in the world and again I hope we’d never go there but at the end of the day you need to make decisions in order to avoid that in the future. But I’m very optimistic that it’s not going to be needed.”
Although Mercedes eventually resisted team orders, Wolff also explains that the squad will step in if reliability concerns arise, using the recent example of the controversial Austrian Grand Prix to illustrate his case.
“We had a situation where both cars were clearly… I would not say damaged but the brakes were not in the state where they could properly race each other. We were coming to a point where only [Lewis and Nico] raced each other and the brakes were near failure.
“We saw what happened to [Sergio] Perez, he had a brake failure and ended up in the wall. We saw [Felipe] Massa retiring the car.
“In that particular situation, we need to stop the racing because we have two cars breaking down. So we would probably interfere and say ‘we have not got the car underneath you to race’.”
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