Wolff fed up babysitting Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg during 2014 title fight

Toto Wolff says he had grown tired of having to ensure Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg felt they were being treated equally by the middle of the season and that the Spa-Francorchamps clash allowed him to clear the air for the remaining races.

It was immediately apparent when the cars rolled out for the first pre-season test in Jerez it that, with Mercedes enjoying a clear pace advantage over the rest of the field, the title fight would be between Hamilton and Rosberg.

But with the Silver Arrows hierarchy allowing both of their drivers to challenge for individual honours, rather than imposing team-orders, Wolff admits it became tiring reassuring Hamilton and Rosberg they were being given equal treatment.

“The anger wasn’t particularly on Nico, the anger was on the whole situation,” Wolff told Sky Sports F1 as he discussed his reaction following Hamilton and Rosberg's second-lap collision in Belgium.

“Every single weekend we had new challenges, every single weekend we needed to mediate between the drivers, every single weekend we needed to judge and spend time on how to balance things out. It came to point where I felt I had had enough. I had had enough, my job is not to always make sure that both felt okay and that was for me the end.

“It needed to end and therefore in hindsight Spa was a very important step and milestone for the team because it ended there. We never had any controversy afterwards, it was very competitive, it was not always easy, it was still challenging, but we understood that there was a great battle between the two and that harmony was not a feeling we could expect from the two of them and we didn’t.

“But we didn’t have a situation again that was detrimental to the team and was disrespectful to the team, because we were working our balls off to deliver a car that was able to win the World Championship and you don’t throw races away like we did at Spa.”

Far from splitting the team into two competing halves, Wolff says the fall-out from Spa allowed Mercedes to reinforce their goals for the season.

“There was lots of talk about blackout and no blackout – we need to reconcile within the team and make sure the team was aligned and we had a joined view,” he added.

“We spent a lot of time analysing with the two sides of the garage what had happened and agreeing that we wouldn’t want that to happen again.

“We went out of these meetings with very good spirits – different from before. We had cleared the air.

“In order to reconcile, in order to succeed, we said ‘give us a couple of days'. We needed to decide how we wanted to continue and that was very important for the team and for the drivers to see that that was the priority for the team.

“Then we saw each other at the end of the week and discussed things and went out respecting each other and reminding each other what the rules of engagement were and reminding each how we wanted to continue and what the targets were. The targets were to win the first ever Constructors’ Championship for Mercedes and to win the Drivers’ Championship in a way we could be proud of.”