Marcus Ericsson admits it was "painful" to allow Sauber teammate Pascal Wehrlein past and ultimately into a points scoring position during last weekend's Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
Ericsson, who has not scored points since the 2015 Italian Grand Prix, had been running in 10th when he was told to allow the faster Wehrlein through in order to give the Swiss outfit the best possible chance of securing its second points finish of the season with McLaren's Stoffel Vandoorne bearing down on them. Wehrlein went on to seal his fifth point of the year, while Ericsson narrowly missed out on his first points finish in 36 races.
"It was difficult to give it up because it has been a long time since I scored points, so it was hurting to let that position by but the team was giving me the order and I had to listen to them," Ericsson explained. "After I let him past I kept up the pace with him, I think I was like two seconds behind or something, just covered him from Vandoorne to help the team get points.
"It's good for the team to be in the points again but it's a bit painful for me not to be scoring them. We had a tough fight but after I kept positions it was good. I thought it was kind of over and I was going to pull away and then I got the call to let him switch positions to cover Vandoorne, so I had to listen to that. It was a shame because I thought I could have kept my place."
The Swedish driver feels he was unfortunate to have caught a spinning Grosjean in the tight and twisty middle sector, which slowed his progress and allowed Wehrlein to catch up.
"Unfortunately I was quite unlucky with Grosjean's problem, because he slowed me down. It made Pascal close up the gap to me and then we had quite a hard fight for a few laps and we touched a bit. The thing was Pascal didn't close on me until Grosjean had his problem.
"So Grosjean had his problem when he spun and he came out directly ahead of me and he had a really, really slow middle sector, so after that I lost two or three seconds being behind him because you cannot overtake in the middle sector."
Ericsson believes he would have been able to hold on for points had Sauber opted to keep positions as they were.
"The team obviously wants to be on the safe side and they thought this was more safe, but like I said I'm pretty sure there's no way Vandoorne would have overtook Pascal and me if we had kept positions. I'm pretty sure of that. But I'm a team player and I respect the team. Sometimes it hurts because you don't agree."