Mercedes realised before the 2014 season began that their drivers would dominate the championship and decided to impose “rules of engagement” on the pair of them.
The team’s former strategist James Vowles has revealed how they impressed upon Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg the importance of co-operating as team mates while fighting for the title.
Vowles described how they used one of the most controversial episodes from Michael Schumacher’s career as an example of how drivers can spoil their legacies through unsporting incidents. Schumacher collided with rival Jacques Villeneuve while the pair fought for the title in the final round of the 1997 season, and was disqualified from the championship as a result.
Mercedes knew before the season began they would be the team to beat by a wide margin, said Vowles. Therefore they urged Hamilton and Rosberg to race each other fairly and not risk compromising the team.
“Both Nico and Lewis knew that it was one of those two winning the year,” Vowles told High Performance. “And they knew, by the way, before we turned a wheel at the first race.”
Vowles wrote an internal document which laid out “really clear boundaries” on how the pair behaved off the track and interacted with each other on it.
“It starts with an ethos I believe in today,” explained Vowles, who is now Williams’ team principal. “That whole first page was about being a sportsman. To explain it, you can win a world championship, but if you’ve done so in a way that is not fair and sportsmanlike, you will have regrets for the rest of your life.
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“You have a championship to your name, but it’ll be sullied. It’ll be muddied. It won’t be pure.
“We, at the time there, wanted to win things by doing things just better than everyone else. Not because we’ve found other mechanisms, we just want to be better than everyone else. And that applies to the drivers, as it does to the engineers within the team, as it does the designers.”
The team wanted to make the drivers understand “you can become the best sportsman in the world, which will create a legacy for many, many years, or you can win a race by doing something that is perhaps forced or hurt or damaged your team mate. Which [way] do you want to go?”
“It’s a very simple choice when you present it to sportsmen,” he said. “Ultimately they want the one that creates a legacy in many years to come.
“Michael – an incredible man, but still marred by 1997 in many regards. It stands out in everyone’s mind. We created the mindset that ‘that’s not how I want to be remembered, I want to be remembered that we were a dominant force working together’.”
Mercedes gave the drivers assurances that “between the two of you, within these rules, the fastest driver across 20 races will win,” he said.
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“Not the fastest driver on a [single] weekend, not the one that’s done something that’s maybe benefitted them in the short term: The fastest driver on 20 races.
“We’ll construct it and make sure it’s built that way, and we’ll give you each equal opportunity. And they bought into it and it created a good environment.”
Despite Mercedes’ efforts, “breakdowns” occured in the relationship between Hamilton and Rosberg at times, most notably when the pair collided and retired while fighting for the lead on the first lap of the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix.
“It still sticks in my mind today because you’re taking two of these sportsmen that were constrained within their boxes and just got frustrated,” he said. “But actually what you do at the time is you don’t back off, you double down and [tell them]: This is how it’s going to be.”
Schumacher drove for Mercedes between 2010 and 2012, before he was replaced by Hamilton. Vowles said Rosberg’s 2016 championship win showed what he had gained from observing the seven-times champion.
“Michael taught Nico how to work really hard,” he said. “Michael wasn’t the most skilful in the car – that was Lewis. But he knew how to extract every millisecond out of himself and every millisecond out of the team.
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“He was a leader that absolutely would say ‘I’m going to go this way’. The team would follow in there. So much so that both sides of the garage wanted him to do well, so much so that one of my regrets in my career is we didn’t get a win for him. That that still hurts me today. He deserved to win.”
Schumacher’s behaviour with the rest of the team, and focus on extracting the maximum from himself, made an impression on Rosberg, Vowles believes.
“He had a genuine interest in who you were and your life. I went motorbiking on-track with him […] in Paul Ricard and we had the time of our lives. We both still laughed about it so many years after that.
“He knew at the time my partner’s birthday, flowers arrived at home and embarrassed me because I didn’t do that much. He would take a genuine interest in who you are, who your family is, what drives you, every single person on the team. That’s hard to do.
“And [he wasn’t] doing it because he wanted to gain an advantage. He does it because he really cares. That’s Michael. The Michael you had facing the media is a very different Michael to what was behind the scenes.
“That’s how he did it, fundamentally. He would bring everyone on the journey and lead them on the journey. He would squeeze himself, every millisecond he had, he would work as late as he needed to, every hour he needed to. That was how he operated.
“Nico learned a tremendous amount from him. It formed the Nico that then became a world champion ultimately, which is to squeeze everything out of you [that] you can at the cost of everything else.”
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