Toto Wolf broke his wrist, elbow, shoulder in a team buildiing cycling event of the Mercedes F1 team a couple of days before the race. But what if this had happened to Rosberg or Hamilton?
To my knowledge Mercedes had not nominated any official reserve driver this year. They used to have Sam Bird when he was doing GP2 but he went off to sportscars and I'm not sure if he is still involved with Mercedes. I believe Anthony Davidson is still doing some simulator tests for them although not sure if this is still the case. They lost their simulator tester Brendon Hartley to Porsche. There were also rumours of Heikki Kovalainen becoming their reserve driver but this was also never confirmed.
What will Mercedes do if something that happened to Wolf happens to one of their drivers short before a race?
Will they fly in someone like Bird or Kovalainen?
Will they hire a test / reserve driver from another team? (Ferrari tester de la Rosa, McLaren youngster Vandoorne, Sauber tester van der Garde, Lotus tester Charles Pic or Force India tester Daniel Juncadella who races in DTM for Mercedes?)
Or would they hire a driver from a competitor for one race? (Hülkenberg, Grosjean, Sutil, Bianchi?)
It's strange that a team fighting for the title has no back-up plan for such a situation. One of their drivers could also become ill.