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Toto Wolff: “The penalty is just complete nonsense”
Mercedes chief Toto Wolff expressed his disappointment after Nico Rosberg was given a 10-second penalty for colliding with Ferrari driver Kimi Raikkonen in the Malaysian Grand Prix.
In the very first lap of the race, the German was tapped into a spin by Kimi's teammate Sebastian Vettel. Nico was driving a recovery race and he made contact with Kimi at turn 2 as he was chasing the final podium place.
For making this contact with Kimi, Nico was handed a 10-second-penalty, which was ultimately inconsequential as he ended up 13 seconds ahead of the Ferrari driver. He also got two penalty points on his license.
When asked about it post-race to Toto Wolff, "He [Rosberg] did a brilliant drive to recover back to third, made no mistakes, and really there's nothing negative to say.
"The penalty is just complete nonsense. It's not what I want to focus on because we let Lewis down today. And that should be something we must be beating up ourselves [over] - and not moaning over an unfair penalty that didn't make any difference because Nico stayed third.
"A couple of months we decided, all together, that we wanted to have harder racing between the cars - and that if it wasn't 100 percent clear that somebody was at fault, we would let them race against each other. And then this... I don't know, it's for others to comment, it's not my priority after that race today."
Raikkonen said his Ferrari SF16-H was significantly damaged in the contact and he added, "With the stuff with Rosberg, obviously I kind of expected that he was going to try something 'cause he had a bit of a funny line in Turn 1. I was turning in, saw a flash in the mirrors, and had to run right otherwise maybe we would have both finished there.
"Got some damage on the floor, that didn't really help. He got penalised for it but obviously it didn't really change the end result. But, you know, we kept trying and unfortunately it wasn't better than that.
"There was small damage on the front wing endplate but more on the floor, the floor was missing parts. For sure, it doesn't help. All of those things are there for a purpose."