Niki Lauda has admitted it is possible Sunday’s championship showdown will end with a crash.<\/p>\n
Mercedes duo Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg have endured a tense relationship all season, they actually clashed at Spa and now the 2014 world champion will be decided in Abu Dhabi.<\/p>\n
“The chance of a collision is great,” admitted team chairman Lauda, “because it’s the final blow in the title race.\u00a0 We could see some very risky overtaking manoeuvres.<\/p>\n
“But we need to just accept the risk as we are letting them go free.\u00a0 But certainly the risk is much higher than before,” the F1 legend added.<\/p>\n
But Lauda also told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper that he hopes the warring duo will recognise the bigger picture and keep their battle clean on Sunday.<\/p>\n
“Every driver knows that aggression like that can quickly end his own race,” he said.<\/p>\n
Lauda insisted, however, that it is no longer the team’s role to sit the drivers down and urge them to drive sensibly.<\/p>\n
“We are not going to interfere,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Fortunately there are no more third parties who can still be world champion, so now we have a showdown.\u00a0 Any admonition would be counterproductive.<\/p>\n
“They should be free and able to do what they want to be world champion.\u00a0 I just hope we do well enough as a team to get through the race with both cars and no technical defects,” Lauda added.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Niki Lauda has admitted it is possible Sunday’s championship showdown will end with a crash. Mercedes duo Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg have endured a tense relationship all season, they actually clashed at Spa and now the 2014 world champion will be decided in Abu Dhabi. “The chance of a collision is great,” admitted team …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25377,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[5168,5262,5340,154,4,598],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25798"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25799,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25798\/revisions\/25799"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}