Nico Rosberg quashed suggestions of Lewis Hamilton being sabotaged by Mercedes amid claims it gave preferential treatment to George Russell. The 2024 F1 season was one where the veteran struggled to keep up with what his young teammate was accomplishing in the car. So much so that the qualifying and race head-to-head looks one-sided in Russell’s favor.

To add to this, Hamilton claimed multiple times that he wasn’t happy with the car and by the end of the season, he’d said that he couldn’t wait for the season to be over.

All of this further fueled conspiracy theories among his fandom as even Mercedes boss Toto Wolff was allegedly sent an anonymous letter that claimed that the German team was favoring one driver over the other.

With that being said, the last race of the Hamilton-Mercedes partnership was in Abu Dhabi and the driver had a spirited race where he finished ahead of his teammate after a last lap overtake.

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Nico Rosberg was questioned on the Sky F1 podcast about the suggestions that George Russell was favored over the F1 veteran at the team to which the German said that such a claim had no basis.

He pointed out how the team was cheering on Lewis to overtake George at the end of the race as an example of there being no such thing at the team. He said (via PlanetF1):

“Oh no, I’m pretty sure they didn’t. I’m pretty sure they didn’t favor George. One of the best times to see that was Toto Wolff’s [team boss] comment in the race when Lewis came out of the box and he was 14 seconds behind George. He said, ‘So how many seconds?’ And Bono [Pete Bonnington, Hamilton’s race engineer] said 14.”
He added:

“And Lewis said, ‘Geez, that’s far down the road’. And Toto came on the radio and said, ‘You can do this, Lewis.’ This is talking about the teammates! ‘Oh, Lewis, you can do this!’ If I was George and I listened back on this, I’d be like, ‘Toto, Hey, what’s up with that? You should be neutral here.’ So that’s because they were under a lot of pressure, the team, because a lot of fans, every time Lewis gets beaten by George, a lot of fans are like, ‘Oh, this is sabotage’.”
Mercedes went to a large extent to prove it didn’t favor George Russell over Lewis Hamilton claims Rosberg
Nico Rosberg claimed that there was a lot of pressure on Toto Wolff and Mercedes to show that the team wasn’t favoring George Russell over Lewis Hamilton and it went to a great extent to prove that it didn’t favor the former. Talking about the team’s mentality when it came to something like this, Rosberg said on the same podcast:

“The pressure was on Mercedes, and I could see, for Toto, it was so important to show the world that there was no preferential treatment towards George and that they were fair because, I mean, Lewis is the legend. There’s such a tension on there, and it would have been really, really bad on Mercedes if there would have been any, any preference going towards George.”
He added:

“That’s why Mercedes could never allow themselves and they went to a big extent to actually prove and keep showing that there was no preferential treatment.”
Lewis Hamilton will now be a Ferrari driver from 2025 onwards. The British driver built a brilliant legacy with Mercedes, a team he joined in 2013 and with whom he went on to win 6 titles.

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Edited by Prathik BR