Monaco race winner Sebastian Vettel denies Ferrari pre-planned his and team-mate Kimi Räikkönen's strategies so that the championship leader would come out ahead in their intra-team battle.
Räikkönen started from pole position after acing qualifying on Saturday and led Vettel during the first stint before he was called in for an early stop, meanwhile Vettel continued to lap the Monaco streets several times before coming in for his stop, which allowed him to eek out enough of an advantage to emerge ahead.
It was always likely that Ferrari would use team orders or strategy to switch the two, given Vettel's points advantage in the championship, but the German says the stop wasn't pre-planned.
"No not really," he replied when asked if the strategy was planned to switch the two drivers. "I don’t think there was, [you] couldn’t plan much, the plan was to try and pull away, which we did.
"Valtteri [Bottas] had really good pace, we were struggling more with our rears and at that point the window opened, so Valtteri obviously pitted, Kimi responded, for me I had a bit of a gap, nothing to lose in P2, tried to push as hard as possible – within two laps I was surprised myself to be able to pull a gap to be able to come out in front."
Vettel hailed his teams effort throughout the entire race weekend: "Unbelievable, it was a very intense race.
"I had a couple of laps where the car was really good, pushed with everything I had as I knew there was a chance to win and that’s it, so was able to use that [and] came out ahead. I could control the race.
"After the restart it was really tricky with the cold tyres, I think everyone else was really struggling, Turn 1, first lap, was really difficult but after a couple of laps I was able to control the gap behind and what a fantastic job the team has done, credit to them, fantastic weekend for Ferrari."
