Rosberg says Ferrari's team-order chaos echoes his own Mercedes rivalry with Hamilton

Nico Rosberg has taken aim at Ferrari’s management of the growing friction between Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, saying the team has failed to lay down sufficiently clear racing guidelines — a mistake he believes is directly fuelling the pair’s on-track clashes.

Rosberg, the 2016 world champion, drew on his own four-year rivalry with Hamilton at Mercedes to make the point. Hamilton ended up in the gravel at the start of the Italian Grand Prix in Monza, and in Mexico the two Ferrari drivers went off together on lap one while battling for the lead, handing Max Verstappen a victory the Scuderia had been well placed to claim.

Team principal Fred Vasseur publicly expressed his frustration after Mexico, but Rosberg believes the problem runs deeper than individual incidents. “The instructions are not clear enough,” he said on the Beyond The Grid podcast. “Ferrari is not doing well enough at the moment in F1, because the instructions are not clear enough, and then you get this arguing between the drivers. It just needs to be clear.”

Rosberg pointed to the 2016 Monaco Grand Prix as an example of how Mercedes got it right. When his visor fogged up and he fell away from Daniel Ricciardo, he waved Hamilton through without hesitation — painful as it was — because the team had already established an unambiguous framework for exactly that situation.

“Toto [Wolff] and the team did a very good job clarifying the team racing guidelines,” Rosberg explained. “It’s very clear: if the team is looking to lose the race win, then the moment comes when you need to drive as a team and not anymore as championship rivals.”

He was candid, however, about where even Mercedes fell short. Wheel-to-wheel battles, he admitted, were never governed with enough precision, leaving room for dispute every time the two cars converged on track.

“You can never be enough into details as to wheel-to-wheel battles to make it very clear who’s at fault when,” he said. “We tried, we were quite well advanced in printing our own rulebook for wheel-to-wheel battles, but it was not detailed enough, and there was always ambiguity, every single time — also because Lewis is so damn smart in wheel-to-wheel racing, so it was never 100% his fault, and sometimes it would be 100% my fault.”

The comments add an authoritative outside perspective to one of the defining storylines of Ferrari’s season, with Hamilton in his debut campaign for the Scuderia and the relationship with Leclerc still finding its footing.