As Motorsport.com España reports, the relationship between childhood friends Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes turned into a bitter internal duel once the team began dominating the turbo-hybrid engine era from 2014 onwards. What started as a promising partnership quickly devolved into a negative spiral that turned teammates into enemies, marked early on by a collision at the 2014 Belgian Grand Prix at Les Combes where Rosberg tried to pass Hamilton on the outside, damaging both cars and handing victory to Daniel Ricciardo.
Rosberg explained on the Beyond The Grid podcast that the situation escalated progressively through major peaks of tension, eventually drawing massive public scrutiny and turning fans against him after the Spa incident. As the internal rivalry began creating an unhealthy wall between the two sides of the garage—with mechanics and engineers starting to compete against each other and potentially holding back shared information—Mercedes boss Toto Wolff took a drastic and unexpected decision before the 2016 season: he swapped the mechanics and engineers of both drivers.
Walking into the garage in Melbourne for Friday practice, Rosberg suddenly discovered his usual crew working on Hamilton's car and found himself facing his rivals—the mechanics who wanted Lewis to win—now tasked with preparing his own machine. Fortunately for Rosberg, who had won the final three Grands Prix of 2015, he adapted quickly and extended his winning streak by taking the first four races of 2016 to reach seven consecutive victories, a feat Hamilton never managed to equal.
Lewis Hamilton, however, had a much harder time adjusting to the sudden shake-up. According to Rosberg, whenever things did not go his way, Hamilton immediately began suspecting a conspiracy, which ultimately hurt him during the first part of the season despite the team ensuring equal treatment for both drivers as much as possible.
Wolff's radical crew swap failed to completely erase the drama, as the two drivers still suffered two more major crashes during the 2016 campaign. Rosberg ultimately secured his first and only Formula 1 world championship title by a narrow margin, choosing to announce his retirement from the sport just five days later.
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