Toto Wolff says he would have no problem suspending Lewis Hamilton or Nico Rosberg for a race as a punishment for any future collision.
Ahead of this weekend's British Grand Prix Mercedes has rewritten its rules of engagement for Hamilton and Rosberg following another collision in Austria, though it opted against implementing team orders. Yesterday Wolff said both men were on a "final warning" but refused to be drawn on specific details on the greater deterrents which are now in place for the team's drivers.
The Mercedes boss has made it clear he has no qualms with forcing either man to miss a race if there is another incident this season.
When asked by Sky Sports F1 if he would really sit Hamilton out for a weekend given what the team pays him, he replied: "You know 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. 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."
However, Wolff hopes the measure is never needed.
"We have a massive organisation and one of the best brands in the world and again, 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."
Though the implication is that one driver would be banned, Wolff also thinks both men need to start taking responsibility for any coming together.
"I came to the realisation on Sunday night 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 and 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."
Though Mercedes has been praised for allowing its two drivers to race during its current period of dominance Wolff thinks team orders should have been implemented in the closing stages of the Austria race given the fact both cars were damaged.
Asked if he wished team orders had been implemented in that race, he said: "The answer is yes and I tell you why. 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'."