Lewis Hamilton believes Sergey Siroktin’s “disrespectful” actions led to the pair nearly colliding during Brazilian GP qualifying.
The Mercedes driver almost turned into the Russian as he sped up the inside on the approach to Juncao rather than staying on the racing line which would be on the outside.
Despite what would initially appear to be a slam dunk penalty to Hamilton for impeding, it emerged both drivers were on out-laps and the behaviour of the Williams driver certainly irritated the world champion.
“When you’re on an out lap, towards the end of the lap, you try to back off and get a gap and as far as I knew no one behind was on a lap so I was making sure I had a gap,” he explained.
“Then all of a sudden out of Turn 11 I saw a car coming. I thought someone might have been on a lap, so I went to the left and that’s where he decided to go. But he wasn’t on a lap so I don’t really know what his thinking was.
“Between all the drivers, we all know to keep our space by that point so it was generally quite a disrespectful move. I was trying to get out of his way and then he got to the corner and slowed up.
“It was kind of strange, it was completely unnecessary because he had space behind. Hopefully, he can learn from it.”
The matter has not been investigated by the stewards much to the surprise of many, particularly given the potential accident that could have occurred if the pair had collided.
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Sirotkin, however, also played down what happened even questioning why it was causing a debate.
“To be honest [there’s] nothing I’m too angry with him for,” he said. “I needed to push that lap to get my tyres… It was all a bit unplanned where we were and we could not put the tyres in the blankets between the runs so we were massively down on temps.
“Basically that outlap was as quick as my any other lap, almost. I was properly flat out, I was coming through the very quick left-hander there and he was stopping to prepare his lap.
“He gave me the racing line but I was already on the left so I had to pass through the grass and basically my lap was ruined after that but he’s a champion, he knows what he’s doing and didn’t change my position at the end of the day. But it’s a good day in general.”
As a result, Hamilton will retain his pole position which is his 10th of 2018 and Mercedes’ 100th in their F1 history after beating Sebastian Vettel by almost a tenth.
“I didn’t know whether I had pole – the last lap wasn’t that great if I’m honest,” he said.
“I was so grateful when I heard that I had pole. Just a lot of work has gone on in the background with my engineers to make sure we got the car to the best place we could.”