Allison: We were too conservative with Bottas in Hungary

Mercedes technical director James Allison has defended the team's strategy decision during the Hungarian Grand Prix with Valtteri Bottas. Mercedes opted to leave Bottas on a one-stop strategy in the hopes of slowing Sebastian Vettel's progress in the race.

After Ferrari chose to bring Kimi Raikkonen in for a very early stop during the race in the hopes of disrupting the Mercedes game plan, the Silver Arrows opted to pit Bottas on the next lap in direct response to the stop. However, Allison admitted in Mercedes' Pure Pitwall video that the decision might have been the wrong call upon reflection.

"In hindsight, yes, we could have (waited). Whether or not we could have stayed out long enough to have made a difference is another question altogether.

"Kimi was a few seconds behind Valtteri when he made his first stop of the day so we had a small amount of breathing space. We had a bit more breathing space by the fact that Kimi's pit stop was actually quite slow.

"Although we did choose to react quite quickly, we contemplated for a little while pushing out another couple of laps, making it more of a tight thing to Kimi to prevent him undercutting us.

"We contemplated it but in the end, we rejected it, because we thought: well, we too might have a bad pit stop. What we definitely don't want to do is lose the position to Kimi by pushing our luck too far.

"Arguably we were a little conservative. Arguably we could've had a couple more laps on that first stint and then as a result of that been a little bit less exposed at the end of the race.

"But the reality is that we lost the rubber with about six or seven laps to go, and those two laps wouldn't have made any difference," he pointed out. "It's always a swings and roundabouts thing and never quite as obvious as it looks at first glance."

The strategy and unfolding events during the grand prix ultimately led to a Lewis Hamilton victory, a prospect that Mercedes would have pounced on after Friday practice having found themselves so far off of Ferrari's blistering pace.

Bottas however was left to rue another race in which he played second fiddle to his four-time champion teammate and a scrappy end to the race which saw him collide with Vettel and then Daniel Ricciardo, the latter earning him a 10-second time penalty for an avoidable collision.