Lewis Hamilton has conceded the crash involving Sebastian Vettel and Valtteri Bottas at the start of the French Grand Prix was a racing incident and not indicative of the German being prone to error under pressure.
Hamilton, who won Sunday’s race, criticised the decision to give Vettel only a five-second penalty for causing the collision but admitted such incidents will happen when drivers are pushing to the limit.
The Mercedes driver led from pole at Paul Ricard but Vettel, who made a quick start from third had nowhere to go into turn one and clipped the rear of Bottas’s car. Hamilton’s team-mate sustained a puncture while Vettel had to replace his Ferrari’s rear wing. Enforced stops dropped both drivers to the back of the field. Vettel finished fifth and Bottas seventh, a result that ensured Hamilton retook the lead of the world championship by 14 points.
He had said the penalty had not been sufficient, given Bottas also took damage to the floor of his car, but said: “It is really a racing incident and those things can happen. We’re all going into that first corner at great speeds. We’re all on the edge, we’re fighting for world championships, we’re not pootling around, we’re out there putting our lives on the line, we’re out there putting the cars as far beyond the edge as we can in the safest manner. It’s not like a train track, you don’t just stay on the rails. Sometimes you can go off. We’re only human.”
Vettel’s recovery was impressive but he would have been hoping for better than fifth before the race. “It didn’t feel or didn’t appear there was a lot I could have done differently,” he said. “I tried to get out of it. You don’t hit the brakes 200 metres before the corner just because you think it could be a bad spot to be in, you still try to be competitive.”
Hamilton avoided the crash and proceeded to run a controlled and dominant race, with Max Verstappen’s Red Bull finishing second and Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari third.
Hamilton said the race had again showed the current cars, which create major air turbulence, make overtaking difficult. “I think it’s the fundamental issue of the cars,” he said. “Max has to be 1.5 seconds faster than me to overtake, or more. Anything less than and he’s got no hope. I want to see more closer racing, not just at the start of the race, so I hope they are able to somehow figure that out.”
F1 will instigate new aerodynamic rules for next season in an attempt to reduce dirty air to allow cars to follow one another more closely but the problem will reman this season.
The teams head to Austria this weekend for the second round of the sport’s first triple-header before going to Silverstone for the British Grand Prix the following week.
“At [Speilberg] you can’t really overtake,” Hamilton said, “even though you’ve got those long straights. You can’t follow through turn one. It’s going to be about who qualifies where.”
