The difficult questions Mercedes has to answer

The safety car deployment which definitively tilted the Barcelona Grand Prix in Lewis Hamilton's favour spared Mercedes from having to make a painful decision about team orders.

But it was only a question of delaying the inevitable.

Other teams, particularly Ferrari, are eroding Mercedes' previous position of dominance so it cannot afford its drivers costing each other points-scoring opportunities, or threatening its own run towards the constructors' championship. In public, George Russell and Kimi Antonelli are acknowledging as much – the question is whether this understanding, based on dialogue between them and team boss Toto Wolff after Barcelona, can withstand the heat of combat.

"It's clear the win for the team is the priority," said Russell ahead of this weekend's Austrian Grand Prix.

"It doesn't matter which driver. You saw in Canada, Kimi and I fought really hard, but we were pulling away from everybody else, so the win for the team was not under threat.

"But then you look in Barcelona and suddenly you have another driver who's in the fight. And okay, Lewis had the safety car, this helped a lot. Without the safety car, Kimi and I were losing time together and it would have given the opportunity to Ferrari to win. And that is when we need to be smart as team-mates and it's very clear the team wants to win the race. It doesn't matter if it's me or Kimi."

The battle between the two Mercedes became physical in Canada, and the team only held off ordering them to hold station because they were still pulling away from the field

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Easy to say in the comfortable environs of an air-conditioned press conference room as the mercury passes 30C outside. Historic precedent demonstrates how fragile that team spirit becomes when fighting for a race win or one of the peripheral steps on the podium.

The prospect of having to stage an intervention between its drivers first became imminent in Canada, where Antonelli and Russell – then running 1-2 in the drivers' standings – battled for the lead in both the sprint and the grand prix. At various points the team harmony was sorely tested, as evinced by angst-ridden radio messages as the Mercedes team-mates banged wheels on track.

Antonelli also came close to hitting the back of Russell's car at the final chicane as he responded to being overtaken on the preceding straight. The battle was resolved on Sunday by Russell's car expiring with an as-yet unexplained battery problem (the power pack in question is still on a boat somewhere in the North Atlantic, since such hardware items are not permitted within the cargo hold of an aeroplane).

Afterwards Mercedes admitted that it had come close to ordering its drivers to hold station, and had only pulled back from doing so because they were still pulling away from their rivals on track. But Wolff was still unequivocal about what the future may hold.

"If there was a situation where we believe the team is at risk of losing points or there was a situation where we were losing so much time to our competitors behind, then we would not be a millimetre hesitant of putting the handbrake on," Wolff said.

In Barcelona circumstances also contrived to stay Mercedes' hand. By this point Russell had already fallen behind Hamilton in the drivers' championship, so the stakes were rather higher as he sought to stay ahead of Antonelli on track – both before their final pitstops, when they were running first and second, and after the safety car deployment, when they were second and third behind Hamilton.

In trying to repass Russell in Montreal, Antonelli nearly smote his teammate and the wall

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Mercedes' perspective on the outcome of that Barcelona race is worth examining, away from the prism of fan partisanship.

"We tried to race fair in the team game," Wolff said afterwards. "But maybe it cost us the win. And that's something which we need to discuss with the drivers. How are we doing it if we're fighting somebody else for a race win?

"They raced each other quite hard before George's stop. And I think we lost about four or five or six seconds to Lewis. We're leaving that time on the track. And we need to discuss it with them for the future."

Russell is right that even without the safety car, Hamilton had the opportunity to win. Between laps 30 and 35, when Antonelli caught Russell and got within the margin to access Overtake Mode, Hamilton went from being 18s behind the leader to 7.6s.

After both Mercedes pitted, Hamilton had a 16.8s margin to Russell which the Mercedes driver began to chip away at before the safety car deployment shortly afterwards. Under green-flag conditions, Hamilton's next stop would have put him out in fourth place behind Lando Norris, but the course neutralisation enabled him to pit and retain the lead, which he never conceded.

Without the safety car, Hamilton would have had more work to do but the Ferrari's pace on the medium-compound Pirellis was better than the Mercs on hards. The degradation effect was also lower for him than it had been for Russell and Antonelli when they were on mediums at the start of the race, thanks to the track rubbering in and the cars carrying lighter fuel loads.

In Barcelona the internecine warfare cost time relative to much closer opponents, including ultimate race winner Lewis Hamilton

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So the chances are that Hamilton would have passed Norris relatively easily, if not breezed past him around the outside of Turn 3 as he had with Piastri, before catching the duelling Mercedes. Given that Russell was struggling with severe rear tyre degradation, as a result of Mercedes not adjusting his front wing correctly at the final pitstop, it's highly likely he would have received a "George, it's Toto" call.

Such an intervention would not be about favouring one driver over another – though it would doubtless be perceived as such in the sewer of online debate – but in securing maximum points take for the team and one Mercedes driver winning the race rather than neither of them. As it transpired, Antonelli's battery failure late on saved Mercedes from having to step in to what was now a question of second and third disappearing in a cloud of carbon fibre and gravel.

It's understood that this has been the tenor of the background conversations between Wolff and his drivers. Team orders is always a problematic concept, all the more so when a rival is involved who is on a different strategy, which naturally muddies perceptions.

Ahead of the Austrian GP weekend, Autosport asked Antonelli how challenging he felt it might be for him to rein in his emotions if such a call were to come.

"For sure it's not going to be easy," he said. "Because obviously, in the race, the emotions are running very high and in the moment you're just thinking about doing your best and trying to win the race.

"Of course, from now on it's going to be important to race even more wisely because it's not just about me and George anymore – the others are coming. So, I think this weekend is going to be a weekend where I think all the top four teams will be super close because Ferrari is bringing a new engine, a bit more powerful engine.

In Monaco, where Antonelli won, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff made a rare visit to the podium – he did so because the team sponsor who was supposed to go had already left, but the appearance naturally triggered online suspicions of favouritism

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"Red Bull is bringing a big, big upgrade, which should give them a lot of performance and also McLaren, they've been there ever since Miami. So, I think it's definitely the way I'm going to go racing is maybe a little bit different.

"Also, it depends a lot on the scenario. If there are other drivers that are close, other competitors that are very close, then probably I will race in a different way than if it was just me and George racing. 

"So, it will all depend on the pace, how fast we are and where we are on the grid."

In other words, to paraphrase the late Patrick Swayze in the seminal movie Roadhouse, he's going to play nice – until the time comes to not be nice…