Kevin Magnussen has conceded that he could have done more to avoid the incident with Sir Lewis Hamilton in Spain that saw him fail to score points.
Magnussen had started the race eighth, two places behind Hamilton, and the Dane found himself side-by-side with the seven-time champion at Turn Four, but the pair collided, giving them both punctures.
Hamilton was able to recover to fifth place by the end of the afternoon, but damage to the Haas meant that the 29-year-old ended the race 17th wondering what could have been after the American outfit got both him and Mick Schumacher into Q3 in qualifying.
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In his frustration, Magnussen said that the Mercedes driver “knew what he was doing,” but he now readily accepts that there was no malice involved.
“I had the feeling when I was on the track that he opened his steering, but that’s not what happened,” he said, quoted by RaceFans.net.
“He just got in the slipstream of the Ferrari, understeered a tiny bit, and I was super-close to him. I didn’t give him much room. I gave no margin so we touched and it is what it is, unfortunately.
“I just wish I had turned in one millisecond later to have a little bit more but in a corner like that, if you’re going to go around the outside, you want to be as close to him as possible.
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“You don’t go too wide and go in the dirty part of the track. That’s what I did and we touched, unfortunately.”
The damage cost Magnussen a lot of pace on Sunday, so it was a frustrating day given that there was a real chance of securing his fourth points finish of the season.
“There was also a lot of bad luck in that. If I’d just been a little bit further forward when we hit, we would have hit rim-to-rim and it would have been different,” explained the Dane.
“But unfortunately it just hit with the side of the tyre and his side of the tyre, puncture.
“So it’s bad luck. I wish I had given him slightly more room.”
Schumacher ended the race in 14th after his offset two-stop strategy did not work out, while Hamilton’s team-mate George Russell got his second podium of the season in third.