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Mercedes believe a 1-2 was on without Bottas/Verstappen contact

12:15, 05 Sep 2018

byJake Williams-Smith

Mercedes believe that a one-two finish at Monza was possible had Valtteri Bottas not had contact with Max Verstappen. The Finn was looking to take advantage of his fresh tyres and get past the Red Bull until Verstappen came across Bottas in the braking zone at turn one, sending the Mercedes down the escape road.

Bottas was then held up behind the Red Bull unable or unwilling to pass as the Dutchman was handed a five-second penalty for the contact. Had he gotten past Verstappen, a limping Raikkonen may have been at Bottas' mercy.

“Max is difficult to get past at the best of times and in that circumstance when we’d seen that we just didn’t have the straight-line speed and the run on him we just opted to look after the tyres and sit behind him and wait,” Mercedes chief strategist James Vowles said in the team's post-race video.

“Later on in the race Valtteri was on much fresher tyres compared to Max and very competitive and in that circumstance Max was under a huge amount of pressure. He went off at the first chicane and had a joker call as a result of it.

“By the time Valtteri got alongside, Max didn’t quite leave enough room and made contact with Valtteri. Those are just signs that with our tyre offset we were now the faster car. Had that contact not happened and Valtteri not lost lap time, really Valtteri would have been fighting for P2 in that case.

“We knew that Valtteri could be interacting with Kimi but the concept was also making sure that Valtteri had the best chance possible of finishing on the podium. From there onwards, since he was matching Max’s times, it was to go as long as we could and make sure we had the tyres as fresh as possible to overtake at a later stage.

“That did mean that he interacted with Kimi and had to defend against Kimi but at no time was he losing anymore time relative to Max, all he was doing was building up a tyre buffer which ended up working out very well for him.”