Mercedes was afraid of Verstappen's undercut: "Then he would have won"
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Max Verstappen could have taken second place if we can believe Toto Wolff of Mercedes. For a moment there was the opportunity to go for an undercut, but Red Bull Racing did not seize that opportunity. Wolff goes on to say that there has been some miscommunication with both drivers about when a more aggressive engine position could be used.
"At one point we were only 1.2 seconds ahead of Max," says Wolff at Sky Sports. The Austrian is happy that Red Bull didn't opt for that in the end. "An undercut would have yielded a two-second advantage, so he would have won a position. Then he would probably have been able to fight Hamilton. Lewis would probably have come in if that had happened."
Mercedes briefly feared a repeat Silverstone
It became very exciting with the tyres in the final phase at Spa-Francorchamps. "We had some left, but it was very marginal with a one-stopper. We were completely out of rubber and had a tremendous amount of vibration that seemed to have no end in sight. The tyres can break down at any second and in the event of a puncture you lose the race," he said.
During the first laps Bottas asked his team if he could get more engine power to put pressure on Hamilton. Mercedes reacted to the onboard radio by saying that it is only allowed when fighting with other teams. "We let our drivers fight freely. We discussed that we only have a limited number of overtaking options and we didn't want to use them against each other because we might need them against the competition, like Max. We may have had some miscommunication about that," concludes Wolff.