Mercedes will let drivers race to the end

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Toto Wolff says Mercedes will not change its approach to allowing its drivers to race as the fight for the championship enters the final four rounds.

Nico Rosberg leads Lewis Hamilton by 33 points with four races remaining, meaning he can afford to finish second to his team-mate in every race and still win the title. With the title fight coming to a head, Wolff says Mercedes will not impose team orders at any stage despite a number of collisions between the drivers already this season.

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"We let them race, we haven’t changed that before," Wolff said. "If we start to tweak certain details it would open up a can of worms. We have worked on the principal and it functions well, we have never had any team orders which are not popular with fans and not what we want. So there will be no change, they are free to race."

As well as Mercedes taking the same approach for the rest of the season, Rosberg himself says he is still not looking at the overall championship picture because he needs to be at his best at every race to get the better of Hamilton.

"It’s not hard because Lewis is my team-mate and he is always going to be fighting and tough to beat, so it’s not hard. The best reasoning [for keeping it] is that it’s actually working quite well, so why change something if it’s working quite well with the approach that I’ve got at the moment?"

The earliest Rosberg can theoretically wrap up the championship is in Mexico, with the German requiring at least a 51-point lead following the race in Mexico City to be world champion.

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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.