Vettel brushed off the incident, saying in the press conference afterwards: “I tried to stay ahead. Obviously, we were racing each other. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
“Sure, from a team point of view, if you have the cars quite isolated in second and third, the first car is away, the fourth car is pretty far away as well, so from the team’s point of view, there’s no point in racing and trying to do something stupid because the points for the team are the same, the difference between second and third is not massive, but naturally we try to race.
“What can I say? I was trying to defend my position which I did. I was struggling, Mark was faster. And then there was the chequered flag.”