Rosberg happy with stewards' decision

Nico Rosberg was involved in two of the more aggressive race moves during the Bahrain Grand Prix, the first being between Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton on lap 11 and the second some 20 laps later with Fernando Alonso. Stewards announced the race that the incidents would both be looked at after the chequered flag, leading many to expect that Rosberg would get a penalty or at least a reprimand for one or both of his moves which saw first Hamilton and later Alonso end up off the track and into the Sakhir dust. However the four stewards for the race - Garry Connelly, Radovan Novak, Emanuele Pirro and Mazen Al Hilli - found in favour of Rosberg on both occasions and unanimously decided to take no further action over either incident. In the case of the clash with Hamilton, the stewards reviewed video and telemetry evidence and concluded that the Mercedes #8 commenced his move coming out of turn 3 and "moved to the right in a constant and continuous straight line manner, not making any sudden movements," at which point no part of the McLaren #4 car was alongside him after coming out of the pit lane from his first stop for tyres. Hamilton was behind Rosberg for half the run down the following straight, and the stewards said that "because the delta speed between the two cars was quite significant it was difficult for car 8 to detect the exact position of car 4 in relation to his own car." Hamilton only got alongside Rosberg by running off the track limits, the stewards concluded. If that had not been the case, "then the actions of car 8 may not have been considered legitimate." The stewards issued an almost identical statement in the case of the clash with Alonso, although in this case the Ferrari #5 had been unable to pass the Mercedes so the published decision simply concludes that "no part of car 5 was alongside that of car 8" at any point. "There was the two incidents with Lewis and Fernando which were both definitely good racing," summed up Nico Rosberg in his official post-race video blog post. "I even had to go to [the] stewards for that and thankfully the stewards judged that it was tough but okay so I didn't get a penalty for that." Alonso was clearly less happy with the outcome. "If instead of such a wide run-off area there had been a wall, I'm not sure I'd be here to talk about it. "He pushed me off the track," he insisted. "You have to leave a space. All the time you have to leave a space." Alonso subsequently added on Twitter that "I think you are going to have fun in future races! You can defend position as you want and you can overtake outside the track! Enjoy! ;)))" while Lewis Hamilton has so far held his tongue over his own run-in with Rosberg, who was relieved to hold on to his fifth place in Bahrain. As for the rest of the race, Rosberg declared that "All in all fifth place is an okay result. "Even if I would have started at the front I think [fifth place was] more or less was the best we could have gotten today just in terms of our speed," Rosberg said. "So that's okay, 35 points now in one week - that's okay, that's good. And only 18 points from the championship lead, so that's cool too. "The whole first lap didn't go well. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time also, so didn't get the best out of that so I was back in ninth," he noted. "From then on, you know, great strategy - little bit faster than the people we were fighting against, so I came all the way back up to fifth "Unbelievable in terms of tyre management how difficult it was this weekend," he added. "I think it's one of the most difficult races here for the season in terms of tyre overheating, tyre wear and everything so very, very challenging, which it's different but at the same time is very interesting and creates fantastic racing and also mixes up things, you know. Again today we saw some teams being able to handle it better than others." However, Rosberg stopped short of directly criticising the 2012 Pirelli tyres, as his Mercedes team mate Michael Schumacher had done immediately after the race on Sunday afternoon. [See separate story.]