F1: Bottas says Williams must "analyze" team orders

Valtteri Bottas says his Williams Formula 1 team needs to review its strategy over team orders should the situation that occurred in the British Grand Prix happen again.

Felipe Massa and Bottas ran first and second early in the Silverstone F1 race and were initially told to hold station before being given the all-clear to race. Bottas felt he could have pulled away in the lead had he been allowed to attack team-mate Massa from the start, with the delay robbing him of his best chance to pass.

"We need to have a better look at how we could have got the best outcome," said Bottas. "I won't say any more, but possibly there could have been something we could have done better.

"I just hate thinking 'if.' This was the outcome. Of course we need to analyze if something could have been better and possibly there were things.

"I don't want to say too much. It was quite clear I had a bit more pace at that point, but this is racing."

Head of performance engineering Rob Smedley said Williams made its strategic calls with the overall interests of the team in mind.

"The key point was that we didn't want to get held up fighting each other too hard and that was the message that we gave," said Smedley. "If we were fighting each other too hard then we weren't pulling away from the Mercedes.

"We saw that we did have reasonable pace against them, we knew that they would be saving up their tires until the end of the stint and that's why we made sure that we still had reasonably good tires towards the end.

"Once it became clear that everything had calmed down a little bit then they were free to race as long as it was a clean pass and they weren't going to be backing each other up into the Mercedes.

"We gave that message maybe two laps later and they carried on like that until the stop. We don't want to favour one driver over the other, absolutely not – it's a team effort and we wanted to get as many points as possible for the team.

"The team comes before anybody – it's Frank [Williams]'s team, that's clear – and that was our number one objective, to get the points for the team."

The two Williams lost out to Lewis Hamilton's Mercedes during the pit stops, were then passed on track by the Briton's teammate Nico Rosberg, and finally fell to fourth and fifth behind Sebastian Vettel's Ferrari when the rain arrived.

Originally on Autosport.com