Did Mercedes hand the Spanish GP to Nico?

Good article, very good point. Many clues towards this being the case, not least the fact that had Lewis been in a different team to Nico, he would have been switched back to a 2 stopper once he had track position over Nico and Seb as a result of brilliantly driving as fast on the prime as they were on options.
Nico behind Lewis on tyres many laps older (like Bharain 2014) would not have been able to pass a Lewis who would gain more had they crashed out while he was defending from Nico - so no chance of Nico overtaking. So in that case its obvious that Lewis took one for the team and Nico was allowed to go unchallenged driving his airhead without a worry or thought or need to show better racecraft than he ever has.

So there is no question Nico got a gift from the team, however the clue is that it is a team, and notwthstanding how much they were allowed to race last year, this year Lewis is clearly the number one in terms of prospects and expectation and so, like gifting Ferrari a win and an engineer, gifting Nico a win is better for the team than the likely mess that would have happened with a peed off and indignant Nico angry and armed with a Merc but zero finesse - likely to crash instead of allow Lewis to bitch slap him once again by 'stealing' his airhead win

The biggest clue is that we know Nico was desperate and would be soon resorting to some 'point proving' exercise to disrupt Lewis with Monaco coming up it makes sense for the team to fix the win rather than let Nico scam it himself and probably mess it up much worse

Its all Lewis' fault anyway, why didnt he just crash Nico out as soon as he turned up behind him? Just crash Barbie out every single time he comes close and Lewis wins the WDC

Only someone with real shit for brains would really think Lewis somehow drove worse than Nico in the race or that Nico somehow had all the answers during the race. Lewis was faster as usual and apart from the start, pit stop and strategy, that run on the primes had all the commentators shocked.

There are quite a few of those 'shit for brains ' people about. One, who I wont mention, believes Lewis got 'tonked' by Rosberg and it happened because Lewis had been 'globe trotting'.
Anyway, back to reality. If Mercedes did do that (and the terminology in that radio exchange with Lewis was odd, the tone of it was almost saying, ' look, your just gonna have have let him have this one') I can understand their position as a team. But as a driver I can also see Lewis would be insensed. It's on little things like that that championships can turn it be decided. I think Lewis will have some points to make at monaco, but he',, make them Hammerstyle not Nicostyle.

And one other point. Was  ROSS, Nico's race engineer being very clever when he gave Nico that message about who Lewis  was racing? Doing his bit for his man?