Rosberg, who signed a two year extension with Mercedes this week, has won in every race he’s started on pole, and after losing four of the last five to Lewis Hamilton, he’ll likely need to convert the pole into a win again if he’s going to maintain his championship lead, now held by the thinnest of margins.
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Nico Rosberg isn’t expecting any repercussions after he set the fastest sector time, despite double yellow flags, during his pole lap in Hungary.
The world championship leader set the fastest time of any driver during the second sector of the Hungaroring circuit while passing warning flags for the stricken McLaren of Fernando Alonso.
Race stewards decided after studying data from the vehicle that the German slowed sufficiently for waved yellow flags for a auto stationary on track.
Two tweets from Mercedes announced Rosberg had been called in to speak to the stewards, but F1 later confirmed he would face no punishment.
Nico Rosberg hasn’t won this race, but he is typically the victor of F1 races when Hamilton is not. Rosberg has started on pole position three times already this season, and he converted each one of those into a race victory.
“According to the stewards, “telemetry demonstrated that the driver reduced speed significantly into Turn 8”.
“It needs to be clarified, for us drivers to understand the yellow flag situation because the way it is written is not potentially how it is interpreted, so more clarification would be good”, said Hamilton. It would have been interesting without that yellow so I’m a little disappointed because of what could have been, but at the same time the session went really well.
“For me there was no question I had to lift because Fernando was on the track, but perhaps for Nico the track had cleared but there were still flags”.
“Well yes, when it is a yellow flag it says that you have to be prepared to slow down or you have to slow down and lose some time”, he said. Several drivers, including Hamilton, had qualifying laps deleted by race stewards.
‘Nico only lost a tenth through the corner so if that’s really what we’re allowed to do in future on double yellows, where I thought you had to pay more caution, that’s now different for all us drivers.
“When I saw Fernando had spun in Turn 9, I was furious as I was up on my lap by quite a bit and when I heard Nico’s pole time, then the time was definitely there”.
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“We’ve more or less fought for it the last two years and I think we’re even closer this year than we have been in the past in terms of pure pace”.
