Mercedes motorsport boss Toto Wolff believes the FIA should reconsider the rules for blue flags after both his drivers almost fell victim to backmarkers during the Singapore GP.
After building up a cushion of three seconds after his pit-stop, Lewis Hamilton lost it all and was almost overtaken by Max Verstappen after he came up behind the duelling pair of Romain Grosjean and Sergey Sirotkin.
An indiscretion that earned the Haas driver a five-second penalty as he solely focused on passing the Williams.
“Romain just completely forgot the golden rule of blue flags and that is if you are in a battle you’ve got to forget about your own battle and move over,” explained FIA race director Charlie Whiting.
“I’ve drilled that into them many times, and I think he completely forgot about it. It was probably one of the worst cases of ignoring blue flags that I’ve seen for a long time.”
Wolff later added: "You need to accept that these guys are fighting for position and trying to have their own best race and we have to respect it.
“I think the drivers need to discuss this among themselves – that if the leaders come, and it’s close, that maybe they should have more of a global perspective on what’s happening behind them.
“In a racing car sometimes you don’t know what’s happening and just see that the leader is coming and you’re fighting for your own position. You have to respect everybody’s struggle to perform.”
Later on, Valtteri Bottas was holding off Kimi Raikkonen and Valtteri Bottas in the closing laps with his pace as such that he could not get within the 1.2-second threshold to Nico Hulkenberg ahead to activate the blue flag procedure.
“He was upset because he couldn’t close up to Hulkenberg, which was a shame," the Austrian continued.
“Kimi struggled less so, but when you look at Daniel, who was on a fresher Ultrasoft tyre with probably raw pace two seconds quicker than Kimi, he couldn’t overtake Kimi either.
“So again I think something which we need to look at, whether the gap, the 1.2s, is a gap that needs to be adjusted for street circuits."
Whiting, however, was uninterested in making any changes.
“This time last year it was one second, and we had discussions, and we opened it up to 1.2s,” he told Autosport.
“I don’t think we should go any more than that because then you get into a situation where a driver has to back off and lose a lot more time than he really should to let the other car through if he’s got to do it at his earliest opportunity.
“We don’t want that to happen because it’s not fair.”
