Force India respond to Ocon’s comments about helping Hamilton and Mercedes

The drab Monaco GP did not have a lot of incidents to report, but Ocon’s statements about getting orders to let Hamilton pass spiced up a little of the post race discussion.

Hamilton went in for a pit-stop a little early on in the race and hence had some traffic in front of him when he came out of the pit lane.

Ocon who was just in front of Hamilton during that stage of the race, did not resist Hamilton a great deal, and instead let him pass without much fuss.

When asked if he was ‘ordered’ to do so, he came up with a ‘maybe’.

Reports started circulating that maybe Mercedes wants its customer teams to provide it with such favours during the race.

Toto Wolff also confirmed Ocon’s claims as he suggested that ‘that is the way it is’.

However, Force India have rubbished all such reports, with deputy team principal, Bob Fernley, confirming that they would have behaved in the same way with all the front-runners.

“We were looking at tyre strategies,” said Fernley, as quoted by RaceFans.

“There’s just no point [to hold Hamilton up] because we needed to get him home with a comfortable one-stop.

“[Hamilton] could have been anybody, it could have been Ricciardo or Vettel.” he added.

Hamilton overtaking Ocon was not only the highlight for media outlets but also for Hamilton, who took a sly dig at the Monaco GP by saying that the Ocon overtake was probably the highlight of his race.

“It was the most exciting part of the race, I got to overtake someone!” he said.

“I was excited for a second. But he didn’t put up a big fight or anything like that so it wasn’t too difficult.” the Brit added.