Alfa Romeo’s track engineering manager Xevi Pujolar said he didn’t understand why Antonio Giovinazzi refused to let his teammate pass when asked.

Giovinazzi ignored two instructions to let Kimi Raikkonen pass him in the closing stages of Sunday’s race. Raikkonen was significantly faster in the laps before catching up with his teammate.

“We asked to change positions, but at that point too Antonio was starting to pick up the pace and he himself decided he wanted to stay ahead,” explained Pujolar. “And maybe this situation, these few laps, we could potentially have been faster as a team.”

The two riders got closer to Esteban Ocon, struggling with badly worn tires, on the last lap. Giovinazzi failed to pass the Alpine for the last point by seven tenths of a second. “We needed one more lap to catch up with Ocon,” Pujolar said.

“Of course for the team it was not ideal,” he added.

Giovinazzi failed to match Raikkonen’s pace before being caught. If he had let his teammate pass, Alfa Romeo would probably have had a better chance of scoring a point.

Pujolar stressed that they would have swapped their driver positions again if the opportunity arose. “I didn’t quite understand why we couldn’t swap at this point, because also when we have the two cars we can change them depending on the situation,” he said.

Alfa Romeo is ninth in the championship, seven points ahead of last place and 16 behind Williams. “For us it’s important to score points,” said Pujolar, who stressed that the team only called to swap drivers when it became clear how the race was going to go as the track dried up. .

“At the start of the race we didn’t really focus on who’s stronger, more or less both cars were there. We were coping, we didn’t know how long the conditions would stay like this, so we didn’t want to put too much stress or change positions and let Kimi push hard and run out of tires too quickly.

“So on this stage, we wanted to have a little space because nobody knew if it would be 20 laps, 30 laps or the whole race in inter[mediate] state. But at the end of the race, it was a different story. At that point, yes, we wanted to change our position.

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