The Mercedes Twitter account has responded to a tweet taking aim at rival team principal Christian Horner.The tweet, posted by a Mercedes F1 fan, stated: "Christian Horner will never be half the man that James Vowles from @MercedesAMGF1 is. End of debate."Mercedes chief strategist James Vowles has been with the Brackley-based side since 2014, having previously played a vital part in Brawn's successful 2009 season.Wanting to come to the support of their man in the debate of Vowles or Horner, the Mercedes account simply tweeted back to the fan: "Resisting the temptation to retweet for fear of causing political ructions."Fans of the team will be pleased to see the lighthearted response, given the errors made by Mercedes' strategic team during the Austrian Grand Prix.The incident saw Lewis Hamilton lose the lead during the race when the team failed to pit the British driver under a Virtual Safety Car period after his teammate Valtteri Bottas retired on lap 14.The mistake proved critical for the 2017 champion, who went on to retire with a loss of fuel pressure nine laps from the chequered flag.Taking responsibility for the mistake, Vowles apologised to Hamilton during the race over the team radio, believing it would help the four-time world champion focus on the remainder of the Grand Prix.Speculation that Vowles was forced to relay the message instead of Hamilton's race engineer was put to bed by technical director James Allison, who insists Vowles offered to make the apology.

"You do sometimes hear James [Vowles on the radio], and it's normally under unusual circumstances when we have a message that's either subtle or difficult and we need to get a message to the driver without the intermediary of the race engineer," Allison explained via the team's YouTube channel.

"The normal communication path is that the strategist will tell a message to the race engineer to pass on to the driver and the race engineer will do that. Sometimes you want to avoid the Chinese whisper of that or the message is very important or, in this particular instance, it was extremely personal.

"In this particular instance, it was James showing an extremely broad pair of shoulders, standing up and saying 'that's my mistake, Lewis, and I'm very sorry for it'.

"I think that's characteristic of James, but also a measure of how this team operates, where people will hold up a hand when they have made a mistake knowing that the team's attitude to mistakes is that they are things that they learn from rather than throw blame around for or cause great polemics within the team.

"It was a great example of strong leadership by James, trying to explain to Lewis what had happened.

"The importance of that message meant James wanted to give it personally rather than passing it through the intermediary of a race engineer."

Mercedes' humorous tweet in response to the claim Vowles is a better man than Horner is a good example of Allison's description of the way the team operates; learning from mistakes without placing blame.

Mercedes will hope to bounce back from their double retirement at their home Grand Prix at Silverstone this weekend.