"It was the right decision," admits George Russell after team ignored his request to hold off teammate Kimi Antonelli.

In the aftermath of the VSC resulting from Esteban Ocon's retirement, Russell was running second, 6s ahead of his teammate, who, like Lewis Hamilton, Charles Lecelrc and Oscar Piastri, had taken advantage of the VSC to make a pit stop.

Even though his teammate was on fresher rubber, Russell urged his team: "Just think about working as a team here. Kimi's out of the fight."

Of course, the teenager wasn't out of the fight, far from it, and began to reel in Russell with Hamilton in hot pursuit.

As expected, the call to yield to Antonelli eventually came, and speaking post-race Russell admitted that it was the correct decision.

"Kimi was ahead of me anyway," Russell told reporters. "He deserved to finish ahead.

"When you're in the race you want to fight for every position," he added, "but with the pace on the new tyre he would have overtaken anyway.

"I'm just happy to be standing on the podium. It's been a strong weekend for me, so I'll take the positives.

"We've always said as a team when we're on different strategies we're never going to fight, and we're always going to do what's better," he said of the call to yield to his teammate.

"That's always been our sort of rules, and the fact is Kimi was ahead of me before the VSC, and he tried something different to, you know, protect us as a team. He kind of copy-pasted what the Ferraris did."

Asked if he felt he could have held off his teammate, he replied: "Maybe, but equally it could have been a P5 as well, so in the end he deserved to be P2. I think P3 was a fair result for me, and it's a long season."

"George was a great team player and I'm really happy for him to have held on to P3 as well," said Antonelli. "It was a very intense race and I managed to get the lead. In stint one I felt okay, but then from stint two onwards, I just didn't have the feeling with the car. I was sliding a lot overall and at the end Lando passed me and I knew I had no chance after that. We need to find a little bit of time because McLaren have made a huge step."

"Obviously, team orders are always harsh from one driver's perspective," said Toto Wolff. "You can't expect a lion in the car and then a walkover at the same time, but it's what we always discuss and was something we agree always on the Sunday morning strategy meeting.

"We're not losing time with each other if there's competitors breathing down the neck. We've seen it with the Ferraris at the beginning of the year in Shanghai. You just lose so much race time. You're losing more points, and that's why we are trying to be proactive and avoid losing any points.

"Today wasn't a very difficult call because Kimi was running second clear of George, and that's basically the order we restored after the stop. So completely normal modus operandi, and we would have done it the other way around."

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