Lewis Hamilton has expressed displeasure over the team orders that Mercedes gave him, asking him to let teammate and championship rival Nico Rosberg pass in the Hungarian Grand Prix on Sunday.
Mercedes drivers - Hamilton and Rosberg - were on different strategies and the Silver Arrows ordered the Brit to let the German go through and "not to hold him up" in the 47th lap.
However, the former McLaren driver refused, by saying that if Rosberg "gets close enough to overtake, he can overtake". The championship leader Rosberg could also be heard asking his team: "Why is he [Hamilton] not letting me through?", to which the team responded: "He's had the message."
Listen to the Mercedes' team radio instructing Hamilton to let Rosberg pass:
After the race, Hamilton said he was "very, very shocked" when the team asked him to let Rosberg go through.
"I was in the same race as him - just because he had one more stop than me doesn't mean I wasn't in the same race as him," Hamilton said.
"And naturally if I'd have let him past, he would have had the opportunity to pull away and when he does pit, he's going to come back and overtake me, so I was very, very shocked that the team would ask me to do that, to be able to better his position.
"He didn't get close enough to overtake but I was never going to lift off and lose ground to Fernando [Alonso] or Daniel [Ricciardo] to enable him to have a better race. So that was a bit strange."
Hamilton, after starting the race from the pitlane, managed to climb up the order by making the best use of the changing track conditions and safety car periods.
He fought with his teammate for the final podium position in the closing stages and finished just 0.5 seconds ahead of Rosberg.
The 29-year-old could have finished higher but suffered a spin in the second lap of the race and was overtaken by Red Bull Racing's Daniel Ricciardo, who won the Hungarian GP, in the final laps.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff insisted that the team is analysing whether the decision of instructing Hamilton to let Rosberg go through was right or wrong.
"Obviously, we need to sit down, discuss and analyse the moment when Lewis was asked to let Nico pass - but, like always, we will do this calmly and work our way through any confusion or misunderstanding," Wolff said.
"There were so many things influencing the decisions we made and we must still determine whether we were right or not."
