MONTE CARLO, Monaco -- Sebastian Vettel has played down suggestions the Ferrari pit wall orchestrated his victory over teammate Kimi Raikkonen at the Monaco Grand Prix.
Raikkonen led for the first 34 laps of the race until Ferrari called him in for his first pit stop and delivered him into backmarker traffic. Raikkonen lost crucial time to Vettel, who was able to continue to lap at a faster speed than his teammate before pitting five laps later and resuming the race in the lead.
"From the team point of view, there was no plan of any team orders or anything but I can understand that obviously Kimi's not happy," Vettel said. "I would feel exactly the same, one hundred per cent the same."
Vettel's gut feeling was that Raikkonen's strategy was the quicker option and said that's what he would have gone with given the choice.
"We spoke about the race before [the start]," Vettel said. "If I had a choice at that point, sitting behind Kimi, if I was going in the pits first -- that's maybe what you like to do because you are sooner on the fresher tyres, so I think it's probably one of the rare occasions where the overcut turned out to be positive, so I'm really glad I made that work."
The Red Bulls ended up in a similar situation with Daniel Ricciardo on a Vettel-style strategy and Max Verstappen losing out with an earlier pit stop akin to Raikkonen's. Although the Red Bulls also had Valtteri Bottas' Mercedes in the mix, meaning it was not a straight fight between teammates, Vettel used the example as proof that Ferrari's strategy was not unusual.
"I don't think Daniel had priority over Max going into the race. I don't know where they are in terms of points [in the championship] and so on, so I don't think they look into that but I think the rule of thumb is pretty clear that when you qualify ahead and you are ahead in the first stint, you get priority on the first stop and that's what happened.
"As it turned out, obviously today it worked in my favour which, as I said, I will take it but we are a team at the end of the day and I can see that Kimi's not happy."
Vettel added that he was as surprised as anyone when he came out ahead.
"I knew that the team would call me as soon as we were really tight to Valtteri. We had a little bit of a cushion. I was just going flat-out, trying to go as fast as I can because for me it means that I'm staying ahead of Valtteri, first of all, and close to Kimi.
"I was surprised myself when I came out ahead. Arguably you can say it worked for Daniel and for myself today, it worked well to stay out longer but I think if you were looking at it before the race then you couldn't predict."