Racing
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Nico Rosberg says Mercedes internally discussed suspending both him and Lewis Hamilton for one race after their first-lap collision at the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix, underlining how close the team came to taking extraordinary action against its title-fighting drivers.
Rosberg said on the High Performance podcast that the conversations took place behind closed doors between Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff and then-Mercedes-Benz chief Dieter Zetsche after the pair wiped each other out between Turns 3 and 4 in Barcelona.
“It never came to being fired,” Rosberg said on the podcast. “No, but I know he actually had internal discussions with the big boss, Dieter Zetsche, about taking a step. I don't think it was about being fired; it was probably a suspension or something that would have been a first step, for a race, yeah, something like that.”
The flashpoint was not just that Mercedes lost both cars in the opening lap of a race. Rosberg said the bigger internal issue was that the clash handed victory to Red Bull, with Max Verstappen taking his first Formula 1 win at 18.
Rosberg recalled Wolff's anger in the immediate aftermath. He said Wolff threw his headset on the table and broke it before confronting the drivers in the debrief. “What the hell are you guys doing out there?” Rosberg recalled him saying, adding that giving the win away to “the fierce enemy, Red Bull” was “the most horrible thing.”
Mercedes ultimately stopped short of any suspension, but Rosberg said Wolff imposed a financial deterrent instead. Both drivers were made to sign a contract that left each of them liable for 50% of any crash damage, regardless of who was to blame.
Rosberg said the rule bit hard. “Even if it was 90% Lewis’ fault, I had to pay 50% of the actual damage we caused,” he said. “For one of the crashes, I had to pay $360,000.” For a team trying to contain an increasingly volatile championship fight between its own drivers, Rosberg said, “that definitely calmed us down.”