"If Bottas hadn't made a mistake Verstappen wouldn't have got past him"

"If Bottas hadn't made such a stupid mistake and didn't brake in that chicane, Max would never have been able to get so close behind," Albers begins in the Formula 1 podcast of The Telegraph. "Then the piece was just too short to put him next to it. Only Bottas fails every time under pressure, this has happened several times. Fortunately, he is sporting for us, because of that we also had the victory for Max."

Albers thinks Mercedes missed opportunity

He continued: "But the idea of Mercedes was: 'If Max gets behind Bottas he drives on, and at some point, the tyre temperature and wear will be higher for Max as well. The idea was to let Lewis join and then make a pit stop right away. The problem was only that that idea didn't come to fruition, because one Mercedes driver didn't do what he should have done."

Red Bull also got the message from Mercedes' strategy and relayed to Verstappen that he needed to catch up with Bottas as soon as possible. "So we needed that bit of luck, and Max had that luck too. But the reality is that Mercedes could have won with Hamilton. Because what if Bottas hadn't made that mistake? As an analyst, I don't believe Verstappen would have been able to pass it then," Albers concluded.