Rosberg, driving a recovery race after he was tapped into a spin by Sebastian Vettel on the opening lap, made a late lunge down Raikkonen's inside at Turn 2 and made contact with the Finn's car, securing third place.

He was handed a 10-second penalty – which was ultimately inconsequential as he ended up 13 seconds ahead of Raikkonen at the chequered flag – and two penalty points to his licence.

Asked about it post-race, Wolff said he did not want to "focus on" the penalty after a race in which Rosberg's teammate Lewis Hamilton lost a likely win through a blown engine - but did say the decision was "complete nonsense".

"He [Rosberg] did a brilliant drive to recover back to third, made no mistakes, and really there's nothing negative to say," Wollf stated. "The penalty is just complete nonsense.

"It's not what I want to focus on, because we let Lewis down today. And that should be something we must be beating up ourselves [over] - and not moaning over an unfair penalty that didn't make any difference because Nico stayed third.

"A couple of months we decided, all together, that we wanted to have harder racing between the cars - and that if it wasn't 100 percent clear that somebody was at fault, we would let them race against each other.

"And then this... I don't know, it's for others to comment, it's not my priority after that race today."

Raikkonen: Rosberg could've ended both our races

For his part, Raikkonen said that his Ferrari SF16-H was damaged significantly in the contact, and that if he hadn't reacted, Rosberg's move could have taken them both out of the race.

"With the stuff with Rosberg, obviously I kind of expected that he was going to try something 'cause he had a bit of a funny line in Turn 1," Raikkonen said.

"I was turning in, saw a flash in the mirrors, and had to run right otherwise maybe we would have both finished there.

"Got some damage on the floor, that didn't really help. He got penalised for it but obviously it didn't really change the end result. But, you know, we kept trying and unfortunately it wasn't better than that.

"There was small damage on the front wing endplate but more on the floor, the floor was missing parts. For sure, it doesn't help. All of those things are there for a purpose."

Additional reporting by Jonathan Noble and Roberto Chinchero