The Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg rivalry at the Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team in 2016 was absolutely legendary. If you weren’t watching F1 a decade ago, as most people weren’t, this was a nuclear-level arms race between two of the top talents of the era in what was inarguably the best car on the grid. Just a handful of rounds in to the 2016 F1 season, however, both drivers almost lost their rides, which could have had career shattering effects. In a recent interview with The Athletic, team boss Toto Wolff admitted that he fired both Hamilton and Rosberg for continually coming together on track and costing the team points. He even went so far as sending both drivers’ redundancy papers to Leap Day William lookalike, then-Mercedes-Benz-CEO Dieter Zetsche to sign off on the action.
They say your teammate is your best competition because nobody else is in the same level of equipment. Some of these egotistical young hot-heads don’t do well in an environment of intense competition, and teammates grow into heated rivalries (not like the Hockey show) where both drivers suffer. Especially early in his career, Lewis Hamilton had a hard time not being the number one driver at his team, so when Nico Rosberg won the first four races of the 2016 season on the trot, round five saw Hamilton starting to get desperate. It’s difficult to say one driver is to blame more than the other in this incident, but watch it for yourself and see what you think. Another crash on the last lap of the Austrian Grand Prix in July was too much for Wolff to abide.
Regardless of who is at fault, Wolff was pretty clear that the drivers are not on the grid to settle their own personal scores.
“You’re representing the Mercedes brand,” Wolff would tell his drivers. “and you just have to accept that it’s not all about you. So, fact: they are competitors. We accept the competition. We accept them racing against each other as long as they respect certain red lines. And that is very simple: don’t crash into each other.
What stopped Wolff from firing them?
More from Wolff regarding the decision:
In 2016, (Nico) Rosberg and (Lewis) Hamilton crashed, and then they crashed again. So I fired them. I called my chief executive officer, Dieter Zetsche (at the Mercedes-Benz automotive company), and said, “Listen, you need to sign something.” And he called me back and said, “You’re making both drivers redundant?” And I said, “Yeah, because otherwise they won’t understand how important it is to the interest of the brand and the team above their own.”
That moment of hesitation from Zetsche caused Wolff to reconsider his actions and eventually they decided not to deliver the walking papers to Hamilton and Rosberg. Instead, they called both drivers in and told them not to let it happen again. Toto told them, “so what I said to them is that if it happens again, one has to go, and I may make a mistake. I may send the wrong one away.”
In the end, Nico Rosberg won the 2016 World Drivers’ Championship by just 5 points over Lewis Hamilton (who cleared Daniel Ricciardo in 3rd by 124 points). Rosberg retired shortly after winning his championship. Hamilton, still active in Formula One a decade later, won the next four championships in a row with Mercedes. Would the run of eight consecutive Constructors’ World Championships have been ended prematurely?
If Toto had fired both drivers mid-season as he threatened to, would Mercedes have still won those titles? Who would he have hired to replace the pair? When Rosberg left the team his replacement was Valtteri Bottas, who was racing for Williams-Mercedes at the time. He could have been pulled up a year early and perhaps have won the championship for himself in that rocketship of a car. Perhaps young Mexican Sergio Pérez could have been promoted from the Mercedes-powered Force India team and found his stride in a dominant car without a generationally legendary teammate to contend with. We’ll never know, thanks to clearer heads prevailing.
