“It’s important as we start the race to give them equal opportunity. You have two cars starting on the front row, if they run second and first you just have to let them race. Three races into the season, you don’t want to go there yet.”

"Then you see what we did in the race, we made the call because we felt it was the only possibility of winning the race.”

Mercedes's objective is simply to gain the most of amount points during the race (WCC>WDC). If this happens to compromise one of their drivers then so be it. Ofc for the driver it would be slightly different with them wanting to get the most points that they can achieve. So hearing a call to let their teammate past as he has a better chance of getting more points than them would not go down so well. But like Toto says only 3 races have past and we'll just have to wait and see the performance between the two drivers. Imo i think bottas and hamilton are quite evenly matched. Bottas' race did not bode so well due to his lack of race pace. But i don't really know how much was due to purely Bottas. As tgere where many other areas where Mercedes had let him down: the extremely slow pitstops or the high-tyre pressures for the start.