Lewis Hamilton refused to blame anyone at Mercedes after a poor start gifted victory to his team-mate Nico Rosberg in the Italian Grand Prix, a result that cut the British driver’s lead at the top of the world championship to two points.
Hamilton began the race in awful fashion, slipping from pole to sixth. The champion finished second to leave Rosberg firmly in the title hunt after back-to-back wins following the summer break before which Hamilton led the German by 19 points.
“It was lost at the start,” Hamilton said. “I knew that my engineers would be worried or nervous of how the start went, so I tried to put their mind at ease. I don’t know what happened. I will try to understand it later. I did everything normal. I did sequence exactly the same, I think I just got lots of wheel spin. A bit like Nico’s start in Hockenheim.
“I could see Nico pulling away, and while anything can happen, the chances of the win decreased lap by lap, second by second. If I had been eight seconds behind, instead of 15, I would have closed. But it was too big the way the tyres are today. It’s hard to overtake here. We live to fight another day.”
By his undemonstrative standards, Rosberg was particularly animated after the race, skipping on the podium, punching the air and even joining in a singalong.
He said: “It was all down to the start. I had an awesome start and that made the win. We talked about the start as a great opportunity and it worked out fantastically.
“We had the soft tyre on and the Ferraris [on the second row] had the super softs so they had a bit more grip but that worked out great.”
Talking about the championship – in which there are seven races left, beginning with the Singapore GP in two weeks’ time, Rosberg said: “The race is on. Its always going to be a great battle and I look forward to what is to come.”
The Mercedes head of motorsport, Toto Wolff, said: “Today, machine and driver got it wrong. In this particular case it is a combination of many things. We are never blaming anybody. If you start to blame this is when it goes downhill.”
At the other end of the grid, Britain’s Jolyon Palmer criticised Felipe Nasr’s driving following their collision early on in the race. “I had a really good start, made up a lot of places and was trying to pass Nasr,” Palmer said. “We raced side by side through turn one and then he ran me off the road in turn two. He’s not racing very fairly and ended both of our races, basically.”
Palmer, who is fighting a losing battle to keep his seat at Renault, clashed a number of times with Nasr in their time racing in GP2.
