Nico Rosberg says he won’t change his approach to racing against team-mate Lewis Hamilton on Sunday despite their falling out in Belgium when the pair made contact.
Rosberg will start alongside pole sitter Hamilton for the Italian Grand Prix, and although Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has issued a warning that further contact will not be tolerated, Rosberg says he will continue as before.
“The message is that we are keeping on racing, that is the way it is,” he replied when asked if Wolff’s warning would be ringing in his ears.
“It has not changed since before we started the season. The message has been clear. There is no real change at the moment, it is the same as always.
“At the moment I’m out to win, it doesn’t matter where we are. I’m not thinking about the end of the season yet or anything like that. Every race I’m trying to get the best out of it to try and win the race.”
The German missed the final practice session after running into gearbox troubles, but he doesn’t reckon it impacted his qualifying chances despite finishing four-tenths down on Hamilton.
“To be honest straight from the first run in qualifying I had a good feeling and the car was better than yesterday in many areas. We adapted the set-up overnight and worked on it so I actually got straight into it, I was happy about that feeling because I was expecting it to be a bit more complicated.
“Mainly overnight by looking at the running yesterday and the problems we had. The team made some suggestions – there’s also a whole group of people back in the factory looking at the computer – and we adapted that here at the track. I was quite pleased about that because it felt a lot better.”
