Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen had finished fifth but the Finn was subsequently penalised for crashing into the Williams of Valtteri Bottas on the last lap.
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Mercedes once again locked out the front row of the grid with Nico Rosberg taking pole position, but Bottas was the best of the rest as he was third fastest in Q3 after edging Sebastian Vettel by 0.053 with Kimi Raikkonen down in fourth place.
“Once I’d made a decision to try I can not back off any more”.
That saw Mercedes seal the championship with four races still to go.
When asked if he deserved a penalty, he replied: “For me it was racing, I tried to pass and unfortunately we ended up like this”.
“I don’t know, for me it was racing”, said the 2007 world champion.
“I tried to turn as much inside as I could, and there was nowhere to go and we collided”.
Bottas disputed his countryman’s opinion on the clash, having said on the radio: “What the fuck did he do?”
The stewards immediately began looking into the incident between Raikkonen and Bottas, while the calculators came out to determine that in the event of a penalty he would have to drop to at least eighth for Mercedes to claim the championship.
“I should be on the podium, but I’m here with zero points instead”.
McLaren also suffered at the hands of the stewards, as their double-points finish was taken away from them with Fernando Alonso receiving a five-second time penalty for exceeding track limitations.
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“I would guess [he will] – I could look in the mirror and see it was not my fault”.
