Wolff: We will suspend Lewis or Nico so it doesn't happen in the future

Mercedes chief Toto Wolff would have no problem suspending either Lewis Hamilton or Nico Rosberg should the pair collide on track in the future.

In the aftermath of the race impacting last lap coming together between the two Silver Arrows during ther Austrian grand Prix, Mercedes have rewritten the rules of engagement for their feuding drivers.

Asked by media if he would suspend either of this drivers should they transgress the rules set down by the team, Wolff said, "Would we go as far? Yes we would go as far to make sure it doesn't happen in the future anymore, that's 100 per cent clear."

"If we would leave Lewis at home the system that we created three years ago of letting the drivers race has failed. It is a failure for all of us, it is failure."

"It's their responsibility because none of us can grab the steering wheel in the cockpit, it's their responsibility, and then it's a failure of the system, then obviously having two equal drivers in a car racing each other doesn't function."

"We have a massive organisation and one of the best brands in the world and again," explained Wolff "I hope we never go there but at the end of the day you need to make decisions in order to avoid that in the future and I am in very positive spirit and very optimistic that it's not going to be needed."

"I came to the realisation on Sunday night [after the race at Red Bull Ring] that I didn't want to apportion any blame anymore, because it is never clear cut. It's never 100 per cent fault with one and zero with the other, it can be 51:49."

"I had enough of the discussions on the Monday and the Tuesday where within a group of intelligent people, the engineers, we were really trying to come to the best conclusion with who was to blame, and so we stopped all that. It's a joint responsibility between the two of them."

To his credit, the subject of team orders has never been one favoured by Wolff, but he admits in retrospect that in Austria they may have been useful to the Formula 1's dominant team.

He explained, "We had a situation where both cars were clearly, I wouldn't say damaged; the brakes were not in the state where they could properly race each other. We were coming to a point that only the two of them raced each other and the brakes were near failure, we saw what happened to Perez -- it was a brake failure and he ended up in the wall."

"We saw Massa retiring the car and in that particular situation we need to stop the racing before we have two cars braking down, so we would probably interfere and say: you haven't got the car underneath you to race," concluded Wolff.