Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMercedes

Rosberg brakes were 'in danger'

Nico Rosberg's brakes were "in danger" during the first part of the Canadian Grand Prix, according to Toto Wolff.

With Lewis Hamilton leading, Rosberg was told to try and protect his brakes as he followed his team-mate due to rising temperatures. Rosberg continued to do so for a number of laps after his pit stop despite closing to within a second of Hamilton, and Wolff admits there was a spell of the race where the brakes were critical.

"Nico’s brakes were in danger after the first third of the race at very high temperatures," Wolff said. "It was a very clear message we passed on to look after those brakes. I would say that in that particular race the brakes were the bigger problem than the fuel."

And Wolff says the brakes were a limiting factor which prevented Rosberg mounting a bigger challenge to Hamilton late on.

"Brakes were always an issue. We wanted to help to manage the brakes so that the two of them could race each other with ten laps to the end. We gave them the call that brakes were looking okay and I think Nico realised that when he was pushing towards the end of the race that he missed the braking once and, with it being so difficult to overtake here, he probably realised it was going to be very hard to overtake unless Lewis made a mistake."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.