RacingToto Wolff says he briefly fired both Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg after their 2016 Spanish Grand Prix crash, emailing them that they were “not part of the team,” before stepping back from the brink. The Mercedes team principal told The Athletic he even called then Mercedes CEO Dieter Zetsche to sign off the move, then walked it back because he could not clearly assign blame.
The Barcelona flashpoint landed in the middle of a fierce title fight inside Mercedes. Rosberg arrived with a 43-point lead over Hamilton. Hamilton put his car on pole by roughly a quarter of a second. Rosberg launched better off the line, Hamilton tried to counter at Turn 3, and they came together at Turn 4. Both Silver Arrows ended up in the gravel and out.
Wolff said the tension carried into the next phase of the season. “It was almost replicated in Austria,” he said, noting that a second incident dropped Rosberg from first to fourth and handed Hamilton the win, in an interview with The Athletic.
Describing his immediate response, Wolff did not soften the language. “In 2016, Rosberg and Hamilton crashed, and then they crashed again. So I fired them,” he said as Mercedes team principal in an interview with The Athletic. He added that he called Zetsche to formalize it. “Listen, you need to sign something,” Wolff recounted telling the CEO, before quoting Zetsche’s reply: “You’re making both drivers redundant?” Wolff said he answered, “Yeah, because otherwise they won’t understand how important it is to the interest of the brand and the team above their own,” in the same interview.
Wolff said the team then made the shock feel real. “We sent them an email and said, ‘At the moment, you’re not part of the team,’” he stated as Mercedes team principal in the interview with The Athletic. He explained why he backed off soon after. “My problem is that I don’t know whose fault it was. It’s nuanced. Like everything in life, it’s never 100 percent wrong. It may be 50-50. It might be 51-49. It’d be 70-30. And I can’t judge,” he said in the same interview.
The ultimatum that followed was blunt. “If it happens again, one has to go, and I may send the wrong one away,” Wolff said as Mercedes team principal in the interview with The Athletic. He drew a line on behavior inside the team. “It was their personal rivalry that took over, from a healthy competition it went to a rivalry and it became animosity, and that’s just not something I would allow in the organization,” he said in the interview. He also pointed to the wider impact. “People who need to repay their mortgages who work in the factories, what do they think? That you two crash into each other because you don’t like each other? And it directly affects the lives of two and a half thousand people. Who do you think you are?” Wolff said as Mercedes team principal in the interview with The Athletic.
Wolff noted that despite the strain, Mercedes won 19 of 21 races in 2016, with Rosberg edging Hamilton to the title. He added that Rosberg then retired five days after the season finale at age 31, in his account to The Athletic.