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Cape Town - Lewis Hamilton has hinted that there was more behind Mercedes' decision to swap mechanics between the two garages in the pre-season.
Ahead of this year's championship Mercedes swapped personnel between the two garages, sending some of Hamilton's 2014 and 2015 championship winning crew over to Rosberg's side. Some of Rosberg's crew went the other way.
What followed was a season in which Rosberg won four grands prix on the trot to seize control of the championship while Hamilton was plagued with reliability troubles.
21 races after it all began in Australia, it will end this weekend in Abu Dhabi with the German holding a 12-point advantage over his team-mate.
Attending a special press conference with just two title rivals in attendance, they were asked if they felt it had been a "good" decision on Mercedes' part.
Hamilton, though, implied that there was more behind it then fostering unity between the two garages.
He said: "You’ll have to buy my book down the line in ten years time when I tell you exactly what happened. It will be an interested read."
As for Rosberg, the championship leader believes the change in personnel achieved Mercedes motorsport boss Toto Wolff's objectives.
"So the easiest way to answer that is if we look at the recent team spirit within the team because you know we’ve been fighting now for three years and within the team they’ve been fighting for the race wins and for the championship so it’s quite natural that a little separation can happen between the two sides of the garage," he said.
"For the overall team performance that’s not a good thing because for the overall team performance you’d want to have great team spirit, everybody fighting for one direction, everybody holding together and that’s why the decision was taken to rotate a little bit and I think it’s shown this year that it’s been a very very good thing to do because our team spirit has been as good as ever, we’ve seen that recently and we’ve had some great parties together and whatever.
"Everybody’s just sticking together and it’s an awesome feeling within the team so it looks like that it was the right thing to do, even though initially it’s not something that’s super comfortable because my mechanics are close to me and it feels good and everything; to then change takes a little bit of time to gel as Lewis touched on before but I understand that from a team’s perspective that was the right thing to do and it’s worked well."
