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Vettel caught up on the two laps between their last stops. When Mark came out of the pits after the last stop he barely managed to stay in front only then came the "multi21", so Vettel was in "striking distance" before the team order was given.
Mark cannot have backed off at any significant rate, as both drove their respective best laps on lap 45 and the fight started at the beginning aof lap 46. Mark backed off when Vettel was past. He dropped back by 2 seconds almost immediately.
Yes but Vettel should not have been given the chance to get that close in the first place. Mark was about 7secs ahead when Seb pitted first and got the undercut on Mark. Why did Seb pit first? Because the team saw Lewis pit and knew that if they gave Mark first pit stop (as track posution dictated) then Seb would have landed behind Hamilton in third place.
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But I agree with the "eff everyone" attitude. There is a very lengthy Interview with him on Motorsport-Total, which sounds a lot different than Benson's rather biased article. Benson deliberately misquotes several statements. Basically it boils down to these things:
- He said everything that was to say and is tired of repeating it over and over.
- He mistook the Multi21 due to poor audibility for a change of settings. Important messages are usually given more than once, while "multi21" was given only once, so he assumed whatever it was had solved itself, because the message was not repeated.
- He isn't sure if he would have stayed behind had he understood the message properly. He speculated that he might have thought about it, but probably would have overtaken anyways, since he doesn't see any reason to gift Mark a race after the stunt he pulled on him at Brazil.
Not much to add to that, except I am not sure whether Seb is currently running with 'he did' or 'did not' understand the message. It seems to change every couple days. But I'm glad he keeps telling us he's not lying. If he's not lying, he's not a very clever bloke.