Toto Wolff had his finger on the radio button. He never pushed it.

The Mercedes team principal has revealed how close he came to intervening in the closing stint of Sunday’s Italian Grand Prix, as Kimi Antonelli and George Russell traded the lead lap after lap.

“At times, we were thinking, ‘It’s clean, but it’s a bit close’. And I had a finger on the button to Marcus, to Bono, to Kimi, to George, but I didn’t push it,” Wolff told reporters after the race.

The gamble delivered a one-two at Ferrari’s home race. Antonelli won the Italian Grand Prix from 19th on the grid after an engine penalty, with Russell second at 3.857 seconds and Max Verstappen third at 14.718.

Read also: Pereira calls his shot: 'The fight that makes sense'

The Turn 2 moment that scared the pit wall

A Virtual Safety Car split the strategy. Antonelli pitted for fresh mediums, Russell stayed out on used hards, and once the race resumed Antonelli caught his team-mate with six laps to go and started swapping the lead through the Rettifilo and Ascari.

On lap 49 the near-miss arrived. Russell defended into Turn 2 without cutting the corner, and Antonelli slid straight on into the gravel on the outside. Both cars came back out. Antonelli finished the job at Ascari a lap later.

Wolff’s verdict on the sequence was blunt.

“The last incident was unfortunate. George tried to not cut the corner, and Kimi then obviously on the marbles, going straight, and that could have ended up in a disaster when it comes to the race result,” he said.

Read also: Juventus lose their captain at the worst possible moment

Mercedes, he added, “would have looked like idiots.”

Russell wanted more of the fight, not less

Russell finished second and afterwards made clear he had wanted a longer version of the same battle Wolff was trying to survive.

“I was on the hard tyre and Kimi was on the medium tyre [when the VSC came], so if either of us were to pit, it was going to be Kimi,” Russell told Sky Sports.

He accepted the split was defensible with Verstappen still in the fight, but was pointed about how the closing stint played out.

Read also: Is Aston Villa on the verge of collaps?

“I would have liked to have had a fight with Kimi. It was quite a nice battle and I felt I was holding my own at that point.”

First Italian winner at Monza since 1966

Antonelli’s race engineer Peter “Bono” Bonnington had spent much of that stint trying to do from the pit wall what Wolff was tempted to enforce from further back. “Stop yo-yoing,” he told his driver on team radio, and later “keep it clean, no risks here”, according to The Race.

Antonelli did neither, then did both, and became the first Italian to win a grand prix at Monza since Ludovico Scarfiotti did it for Ferrari in 1966.

“We will be talking about that situation as another building block of how we want to race in the future. But I think it was worth it to show the racing spirit in the team,” Wolff said.

Read also: Patriots make Christian Gonzalez the NFL's richest cornerback on the eve of Week 1

Read also: Hokit unloads on UFC star Pereira: The x-rated rant that has the MMA world talking