The Formula 1 World Championship title fight looks set to be contested exclusively between Mercedes drivers George Russell and Kimi Antonelli, in a flashback scenario stretching back to the early days of the Silver Arrows dominance. But the team will hope to avoid a repeat of troubles that struck a decade ago at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.

Lewis Hamilton was a three-time champion in 2016, and had just won the previous two crowns from team-mate Nico Rosberg, with the pair going toe to toe in each campaign with no other consistent race-winning rivals.

The 2014 season had seen tensions go up several notches between the childhood friends, as team orders and strategy decisions were called into question, but the first real flashpoint came at the Belgian Grand Prix, when Rosberg tagged Hamilton’s rear-left tyre at Les Combes , causing the Briton to suffer a puncture. Hamilton retired, and Rosberg was left to finish second.

After that instance, team principal Toto Wolff said that contact between the two drivers “cannot - and will not - happen again." About that…

While 2015 saw accusations of deliberately backing each other into traffic or squeezing the other off the track, major contact was avoided. But then came the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix.

Passing pole-sitter Hamilton around the outside of Turn 1, Rosberg quickly realised that he was in the wrong engine setting and, on the exit of the long Turn 3, pulled to the inside to cover from Hamilton, who had thrown his Mercedes to the inside in a bid to take the lead.

The contact saw the pair spin across the track and into the gravel, with Hamilton launching his steering wheel from the cockpit moments after his car had come to a stop.

Flash forward to the modern day, and Russell will start the 2026 Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix from pole position, with Antonelli directly behind him in third place.

Although the incident is one that will forever haunt Mercedes, it is not one that has really been a consideration since, with Rosberg retiring as champion at the end of that year, and Valtteri Bottas never providing the championship threat to Hamilton that would have warranted such lap one aggression.

68 points behind Antonelli, Russell cannot afford to fall behind his team-mate, and with this in mind, the pieces begin to fall into place at a rate that is surely alarming to Mercedes to suggest that a similar incident could happen again. With the complicated engines and difficult launches, it is not impossible that Antonelli sweeps around the outside of Russell, and then in a desperate attempt to regain the position…we’ll let you fill in the rest.

But George and Kimi don’t have a long history of flash points like Hamilton and Rosberg, I hear you say. And yes, you would be right, but have we forgotten the Canadian Grand Prix?

Just two races ago, the pair were metaphorically at each other's throats, banging wheels and giving no quarter – a racing philosophy broadly given the green light by Wolff following clear-the-air talks after the Sprint race.

The combatants clearly took this on board as, up until Russell’s retirement through a reliability issue in the grand prix, the pair went at it again, getting more than a little too close for comfort on multiple occasions.

Will Russell and Antonelli repeat Hamilton and Rosberg’s 2016 Mercedes F1 crash?

Given the stain that the 2016 incident left on Mercedes, and also that this is the first time since then that the drivers face such high stakes, it is impossible to think that Wolff hasn’t sat both his young charges down, shown them the video, and made clear that this is not to be repeated.

But when the visor comes down, any driver in any category ever will always go for the gap – let’s not misquote Ayrton Senna – and will believe that it is the duty of the other party to avoid the incident. As proof, you need only listen to any team radio broadcast after an incident. Only rarely does a driver accept fault.

The 2026 title battle has been simmering away nicely, and while it is unlikely that we will see a repeat of such a high-intensity flash point, we’ll all be glued to the screen on that first lap.