The reaction from the Mercedes camp following Lewis Hamilton's latest social media tirade has taken a surprising twist as senior staff have come forward to defend their star driver and suggest they actively encourage this behavior.
After last weekend's brilliant victory in the rain in Germany, Hamilton took to Instagram to vent at Sky F1 with accusations that their pundits try to 'undermine' him.
His meassage read: "I never get to watch the races but just got home and watching sky. I find it amusing listening to ex-drivers commentating, not one a single one of them could find a good word to say.
"Whatever the reason is, it's ok I forgive you. Positivity and love wins always no matter what words you use to try and undermine me, I started 14th today and finished 1st. God is good all the time."
Hamilton later removed the post, but now Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has suggested that he would have encouraged the British driver to stick to his guns.
The Sun reports: “I had a conversation with Lewis about it on Sunday night. I think it is great that someone wears his heart on his sleeve.
“He says things likes he means it. We are humans and have emotions and are influenced but others and what they say and you take things personally.
“I take things personally sometimes when perhaps I shouldn’t care what the guy says, whose opinion is not relevant to me or I should respect that his opinion is different to mine. But that is very hard to do on a Sunday after an exhausting rollercoaster ride of a weekend.
“I actually encouraged him to leave all that stuff online and speak his mind. It is what we need. We need to create stories. We need controversies. We need polarising stances.
“We don’t want to have streamlined everything. What would we talk about if we would not have topics that create controversy?
“He’s that exceptional sport star because he has fine sensors and sensitivity.
“Sometimes when you let your guard down and maybe a moment is like on Sunday when you win a race you did not expect to win, and sometimes when you are at home and you are exuberant and you put on the TV and hear a commentator saying negative stuff, that can get to you.
“But that makes him that special individual that we talk about all the time and is able to have performance like he had in the rain in Germany.”
Hamilton's victory in Germany was mired in controversy from the start - the stewards' decision not to impose a time penalty on the Mercedes driver for cutting across the grass following an aborted pit stop has drawn criticism.
Hamilton crucially only received a reprimand for the incident unlike Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen who have both suffered time penalties in earlier races. Wolff, however, believes that you can't compare Hamilton's transgression in Germany to the incidents earlier in the season.
“You could say ‘was I happy with the penalties applied to Sebastian in France and Kimi at Siverstone?’ I wasn’t.
“If you consider the five and 10 second penalties in the last races, they were for much more serious incidents.
“I think the stewards made the right decision in not changing the result. It was possible that a five second penalty could have been applied, but I don’t think that would be the right thing for the sport, and I say that being unbiased.”