28/11/2016
NEWS STORY
Clearly not wishing to pour further gasoline on the fire, Mercedes technical boss Paddy Lowe has said he understands why Lewis Hamilton chose to ignore team orders yesterday.
Though leading the race, Hamilton was aware that his only hope of winning the title was for teammate Nico Rosberg not to finish on the podium. Therefore, following Christian Horner's advice, he deliberately slowed his pace ensuring that Rosberg was backed up in to the clutches of the drivers behind including Max Verstappen and Sebastian Vettel.
What began as gentle advice from his engineer Pete Bonnington soon developed into firm instructions, eventually Paddy Lowe himself ordering Hamilton to up his pace.
As Hamilton continued to back-off, lapping up to 9s off his qualifying time, the team feared that not only would Rosberg be passed but the hard charging Vettel would overtake the world champion also.
Despite the Briton's refusal to comply with team orders however, Lowe is sympathetic to why he adopted such tactics.
"This is what makes F1 exciting in a way," he said, "we are constructed to have inevitable conflicts between what a team wants and what two individual drivers want. They are two guys who are team players but in the end they each want to win.
"Our main objective is to win the race," he continued, "and we didn't like the look of a red car coming though at a far higher pace than our team."
At a time, Team boss Toto Wolff has accused Hamilton of "anarchy", Lowe was loathe to get involved in the semantics of whether the Briton had deliberately flouted team orders.
"I don't want to comment too much on the subject, because we weren't driving the car," he said. "Who knows what the real pace is of a car when you're not driving it. It did present some challenges. In the end, Lewis and Nico are out there racing.
"It was great to see Sebastian coming through, with what turned out to be a very good strategy from Ferrari to get him ahead of the two Red Bulls, that was unexpected," he admitted. "It was nail-biting stuff on the pit-wall, those final two laps... would Vettel get through Nico or even Lewis? We don't often see four cars crossing the line within what felt like a second and half."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Abu Dhabi, here.