Lewis Hamilton backed the decision to ignore a pre-race agreement and pursue the fastest lap late in the Hungarian Grand Prix.
Leading by more than a pit-stop entering the final 10 laps, Mercedes began deliberating whether to take advantage of the huge gap by putting Hamilton on soft tyres.
That led to some confusion between driver, pitwall and garage as the Briton was happy to stay out despite his mechanics setting up in expectation of car No.44.
“Our communication was not great around that,” Mercedes boss Toto Wolff admitted post-race.
“In the morning we agreed that we wouldn’t pit for a quickest lap, that it was bearing too much risk.
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“The call to pit around lap 60 to protect against the Safety Car certainly would have been the right call, but then the gap was never quite comfortable enough. It was a second or two, then 2.5, then we hit backmarker traffic.
“Then obviously we communicated with Lewis, so in the end it was a bit of confusion. I think there’s a lot to learn from the intercom conversation that we had in the garage and the communication to the driver.
“[It was] certainly not 1A, but in the end the result counts.”
Eventually, with four laps to go, Hamilton did decide to stop and would set a new lap record on the final tour around the Hungaroring to claim the extra point.
“You have to weigh up the risks and I didn’t push so much that I was going to make a mistake and go off — it was a controlled lap,” he said.
“I’ve lost the World Championship in the past by one point, so I know how crucial it is to maximize every moment.
“We’re in a year where you don’t know what reliability is going to be like, you don’t know how long the season is going to be.
“Valtteri [Bottas] had a great particularly first race, at the time he had the fastest lap, I had the gap, I felt it was necessary to just get that point with the gap that I had.”
As for Bottas, he too found himself three-stopping after Mercedes decided to pit again and try the tactic that worked successfully for Hamilton 12 months earlier.
"It would have been wrong [to keep him out] because Valtteri's tyre started to grain on the left-front quite heavily because he was pushing so hard," Wolff explained.
"We think he would have run out of tyre anyway, and putting him onto a new hard, [in] a similar way like last year with Lewis, was actually the only chance of trying to snatch P2.
"At the end, it wasn't sufficient. There was quite a lot of traffic in-between that we didn't clear fast enough, and I think it was a recovery drive."
