Mercedes reportedly did not question Carlos Sainz’s pit lane antics in Las Vegas because they knew they were “superior” and “could hand out a present”.

Although Ferrari headed to Las Vegas with rivals and pundits believing the SF-24 would be the car to beat, it was Mercedes who came to the fore.

Mercedes did not question Carlos Sainz’s pit lane antics

Setting the pace in the Thursday night practices, Toto Wolff declared they were the “dirty track champions”, but Mercedes built on that to claim pole position with George Russell in what could’ve been a front-row lock-out were it not for back-to-back mistakes from Lewis Hamilton.

Russell turned his pole position into a victory, the third of his career, while Hamilton used the pace of the W15 to race from 10th on the grid to second at the flag.

Unlike Russell, Hamilton had to make several overtakes to get there but pulled off his passes with relative ease as he cut his way through traffic with overtakes on Oscar Piastri, Lando Norris and 2024 World Champion Max Verstappen.

In fact, such was Mercedes’ pace in the cold desert air on Saturday night, Mercedes didn’t even bother complaining to the stewards about Sainz’s pit lane antics.

Sainz crossed the line on the entry to the pits on lap 27 in an aborted pit stop as the team told him to “stay out” as he prepared to pit.

Asking Ferrari “what happened”, the Spaniard’s race engineer Ricardo Adami admitted they were “not ready”. An unimpressed Sainz told his team: “Wake up, guys. Come on!”

Hamilton, who was racing him for position, noted his actions: “Sainz came into the pit lane but then he cut over.”

The stewards though, did not investigate the incident and Sainz raced to third place behind the Mercedes team-mates.

F1 journalist Michael Schmidt asked Mercedes why they hadn’t brought it up with race control.

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“Normally there has to be a penalty for crossing the white line at pit entry, which gives a minimum of five seconds,” he said on the latest Formel Schmidt podcast.

“Then I asked the chief strategist from Mercedes ‘why didn’t you say anything’, because they obviously saw it.

“He said ‘we were so superior we could hand out a present, so that is why we didn’t report Ferrari’.”

Sainz was not penalised for crossing the line, saved by the wording of the regulation that states that “except in cases of force majeure… any part of a tyre of a car entering the pit lane must not cross, in any direction, any line painted on the track for the purpose of separating cars entering the pit lane from those on the track.”

But while Sainz’s tyres clearly crossed the dividing line between the pit entry and the race track, because he never entered the pit lane – aborting the stop – he escaped punishment.

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