Lewis Hamilton went against Mercedes' claim that both their drivers suffered from the same technical issue during Friday practice as George Russell struggled with his Energy Recovery System.
"Deployment is a bit all over the place at the moment," the younger Brit had said over team radio during FP2. In response, the team suggested that he was not the only one and that the other W13 was also experiencing a similar issue.
But later asked after the session about it, Hamilton went against what Russell's race engineer Riccardo Musconi had said. "I didn't have an issue," he said with a slightly puzzled look. "We have low deployment but no, I didn't have any issues."
After a session which saw the Silver Arrows struggle to match the pace of the front-runners, Hamilton clarified: "We made some setup changes in between FP1 and FP2 and went a lot slower, or the other guys went a lot quicker – we just didn't feel as fast in the later session.
"I know George had some deployment issues here but my car didn't seem to be affected. It's George's turn to choose who goes first or second tomorrow so I assume I'll go first and naturally I'll provide him with a bit of a tow."
Russell also suggested Mercedes would be trying that particular trick to try to secure a strong result in qualifying, and is ready to gamble to make sure he starts Sunday's race in a favourable position. "Bit of a strange day," he said.
"Generally speaking, we're lacking a little electrical deployment here, we're similar to Red Bull but Ferrari seem to have the upper hand on deployment which might be tricky in a race scenario. If you nail the tow around here in qualifying, it will definitely make a difference but it's high-risk-high-reward so not something we're putting a lot of emphasis on.
"Qualifying sessions are where you learn the most about the car and the tyres, and they've been the sessions we've struggled most with this year, so I think we'll both be going out tomorrow like any other quali day and trying to nail the basics."
And the team's trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin added: "The second session was more difficult with both drivers suffering from a lack of rear grip. In terms of pace, it looks like our competitors found more between the sessions than we did so we need to look through that in detail to understand where we have lost out.
"We'd expected this weekend to be tough as the car is very similar to the one that we had in Spa and with Lewis's power unit penalty, we've got a lot of ground to make up in the race before we can get him into the points."
