Valtteri Bottas says there was no controversy in Mercedes ordering him not to undercut Lewis Hamilton at the Singapore GP.
Having lost out to Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen’s early pit-stop, the world champion tried to run longer on his first set of tyres, hoping those behind would find traffic.
Instead, Bottas was lapping some three seconds per lap faster than Hamilton, with the infamous ‘Valtteri, it’s James’ message coming over the radio asking him to slow down to his teammate’s pace to avoid the undercut.
“We have certain rules,” the Finn said. “The car ahead always gets the priority with the strategy and if you try to offset the cars, if the car behind benefits from it like I did, and if I wanted to get ahead it would have been easy.
“But we have certain rules and it works both ways. The next time I’m in his situation it’s going to be the same for me, so that’s fine. Obviously there was potential for better today but those are the rules.”
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Mercedes boss Toto Wolff did admit that, given Hamilton and Bottas are meant to be fighting for a world title, having to issue the order wasn’t ideal.
“It’s not a great call that we made there, but the undercut was more powerful than everybody expected,” he said.
“I don’t think that Ferrari wanted to swap their drivers, with letting Sebastian [Vettel] pit first, and we risked Lewis’s position by keeping him out in order to protect the win.
“This is why we held Valtteri back to keep Albon behind because Lewis would’ve come out behind Albon.
“So overall the team result would’ve been worse than with Valtteri doing that. We owe him that place.”
“It felt like I had really good pace today but obviously you need a big, big pace delta to overtake the cars ahead.
“For sure we will analyse all of the things but we could have done better as a team today.”