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Mercedes driver Nico Rosberg was involved in one of the most controversial Monaco Grand Prix incidents back in 2014.
With Rosberg on provisional pole after the first runs in Q3, the German driver locked up and went down the escape road at the Mirabeau corner. This triggered yellow flags, forcing Lewis Hamilton to slow down on his lap behind.
While Hamilton has never explicitly suggested that Rosberg made the advantageous mistake on purpose, he has heavily implied it. Reflecting on the incident in a 2024 interview with Sky Sports, he said: “That’s just never a way that I’d want to win, and I don’t think he felt any remorse for it.”
Lewis Hamilton suspected that Nico Rosberg deliberately brought out yellow flags at the 2014 Monaco GP. What do you think?
Rosberg and Hamilton were fighting for pole at the time
Mercedes knew Lewis Hamilton was right about Nico Rosberg foul play in Monaco qualifying
The nature of the Monaco track is such that a driver can effectively shut down a qualifying session if they stop, even in a run-off area.
Back in 2006, Michael Schumacher was infamously thrown out of qualifying after the stewards ruled that he had stopped the track deliberately at La Rascasse, denying Fernando Alonso another shot at pole.
And in 2022, Max Verstappen’s camp were convinced that Sergio Perez had crashed on purpose at the end of Q3, which ensured he would lead their second-row lock-out.
Aldo Costa was the engineering director at Mercedes back in 2014, and he has become the first major figure involved to admit that Hamilton was right.
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In fact, there wasn’t even a debate in the debrief afterwards because the team felt Rosberg’s intentions were ‘so obvious’.
“I remember both, Ferrari with Schumacher and [what happened at] Mercedes,” Costa, who left Mercedes in 2019, said on the Terruzzi Racconta podcast recently.
“The discussion was glossed over. We didn’t talk much about the lock-up because for us it was so obvious and another open wound.”
Rosberg went on to win the race by just over nine seconds ahead of Hamilton. That earned him the championship lead, but he eventually lost out to his teammate in a battle that ran until the Abu Dhabi finale.
The atmosphere at Mercedes appeared to change afterwards. In an interview after the race on Sunday, Hamilton famously said: “We’re not friends, we’re colleagues.”
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