Peace declared at Mercedes as Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton display united front
Alonso keeps Mercedes drivers apart in tense Press Conference; Rosberg insists he won't be changing his approach despite Spa collision
Friday 5 September 2014 17:14, UK
Attempting to draw a line under the controversy of last week's Belgian GP, Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton have put on a united front in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the Mercedes team being split asunder.
With the fallout from their race-wrecking collision at Spa eclipsing all other topics of debate in the build-up to this weekend’s Italian GP, the two title combatants inevitably found themselves at the centre of a media storm upon their arrival at the venerable Monza circuit on Thursday.
For the most part, they neutered the barrage with the sort of straight-bat defence that Geoffrey Boycott would have been proud of, parrying a tidal wave of media interrogation in Thursday’s Drivers’ Press Conference as Fernando Alonso, strategically situated between the two Mercedes drivers, assumed the role of ‘ambassador of peace’.
The Spaniard was Hamilton’s McLaren team-mate in 2007, the year in which F1 was last treated to such a volatile – and ultimately destructive – pairing and Kimi Raikkonen was gifted his only World Championship by McLaren’s reckless implosion. With Daniel Ricciardo, the surprise success story of 2014 at Red Bull, hovering on the fringes of the World Championship battle following his victory in Belgium, Hamilton and Rosberg have, it seems, finally found common cause to bury the hatchet. Sort of.
“What has happened in the past is in the past and it is what it is,” declared Hamilton before dismissing suggestions that Mercedes were now a team divided.
“It is important for us to keep a good rapport between us so we can keep the team lifted up – we don’t want one side of the team to want to do one thing. That is our job and we have to remember we are ambassadors for one of the biggest brands in the world, Mercedes Benz, so it is really important how we shine a light on that and that is what we are paid to do,” he told Sky Sports News HQ.
“I genuinely feel that at least my side of the garage will always take the teams’ side – that is their job, that is what they are hired to do. So it is not that they will take my side or Nico’s side they take the teams’ side they are like ‘hold on guys we want to win together’ so that is why the last race we could have had a one-two and it is really important that we do that for them.”
For Rosberg, there were tougher questions to answer. Just what had prompted him to belatedly offer Hamilton an apology for his mistake five days after the event? “Time and the opinion of others,” the German replied, thereby denying that he had been pressurised into doing so by the team. “They can’t make me apologise, it was definitely a decision that came from me. After looking at it again, I felt that it was my responsibility.”
How did he feel when he reviewed the critical incident? “I was not proud in Spa of how it went. I really want to contribute to our sport because I want F1 to be the most entertaining sport in the world”.
And would he change his approach in view of what had occurred? “It’s been very clearly from the beginning that we couldn’t have contact between the cars and so from that point of view the approach doesn’t change for the future”.
Rosberg and Hamilton are believed to have shaken hands at an sponsor’s event last week, but neither driver shot a single sideward glance during the 40-minute conference in which the only emotions threatening to boil over belonged to members of
