Rosberg penalty was 'nonsense', insists Wolff

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Toto Wolff has complained that the ten-second penalty handed to Nico Rosberg for contact with Kimi Raikkonen during the Malaysian Grand Prix was 'nonsense' and ran counter to the policy that the teams and FIA had agreed governing how such incidents would be managed.

"A couple of months ago we decided all together that we wanted to allow the racing between all the cars and if it wasn’t 100 per cent clear that someone was at fault then we would let them race against each other - and then this.

"The penalty is just complete nonsense.

"I don’t know, it is for others to comment and not my main priority after that race today," he added.

"It’s not what I want to focus on because we have let Lewis down today and that should be something that we are beating up ourselves [over] and not moan about an unfair penalty that didn’t make any difference because Nico was still third."

Wolff added that Rosberg was fortunate even to be in the race at that stage, given his first lap collision with Raikkonen's Ferrari team mate Sebastian Vettel going through turn 1 at Sepang.

"Nico was the victim of Sebastian trying it on the inside and was, in the same way as being unlucky by being spun around, he was also lucky that the car didn’t have any damage. He did a brilliant drive to recover back to third, made no mistakes and there is nothing negative to say."

Rosberg himself wasn't about to dwell on the penalty, given that he was able to build up enough of a gap over the car behind to ensure he finished on the podium despite carrying damage from the contact.

"I accept it, and I’m fortunate that it didn’t cost me a position in the race, of course. I had to give it everything lap after lap again in the end there to re-gap that 10 seconds to make sure we had a 10 second gap."

"The steering took an off-set so maybe the tow or something on the rear, but I don’t know the impact," he added. "The first one was the big one. Got torpedoed by a four-time world champion!

"At the same time [I had to] save the engine because of Lewis’s problem. We were a bit hesitant to run it all-out until the end."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.