“Ferrari had a much better start, we have to accept that”.
Advertisement
“I was just so in the groove”. “Sometimes you make it round the outside and sometimes you don’t and this time it didn’t work”.
“It was a good battle with Max [Verstappen] again, on the limit but good racing. I think we are still going to go from strength to strength”.
“It was very costly for me because I lost a lot of places and from then it was an uphill battle trying to fight back”.
Wolff said: “From the team’s perspective, a number of factors meant we didn’t take a double podium, though we did score the most points of any team”.
Hamilton has now cut teammate Nico Rosberg’s lead from 43 points to nine in the last two races to set himself up for a tilt at his fourth title. The safety auto period ended as soon as Vetel pulled into the pits, costing him valuable track time to Lewis which he could never make up.
“The first five races you could tell they felt down and seeing them now they feel great”, he said.
Four wins from four was the headline to Rosberg’s early-season form, but that perhaps belies the reduced challenge that he faced, with Hamilton in particular dragged out of the race at the front due to technical issues. In Barcelona I went for the outside and it worked, so I did the same today and Lewis did a very aggressive racing move, and we touched and I went off. But, thanks to Fernando Alonso’s red flag crash, we never saw it unfold the way it should have done.
“They are going to investigate and try to understand why”.
Mercedes now lead Ferrari by 76 points in the Constructors’ Championship. He has now gone three races without a podium finish. “I was feeling good with the auto out there even though it was cold and slippery”, said Palmer. “We are going to investigate why”.
“From there, it was very much a recovery drive for us”.
In these instances the undercut, a strategical play to overtake cars during the pit stop phase by pitting earlier and using the advantage of fresh tyres, is made redundant as the first driver to pit struggles to get tyre temperature whilst their rival continues to maintain pace.
Rosberg recovered to fourth before he was forced to pit for a second time after sustaining a puncture.
“While this may not necessarily have affected his performance, it would have been quite a big distraction to manage”. “Our guess it that him running wide and over the grass at Turn 1 blocked some of the cooling, so he had warnings for callipers, gears, discs. everything you can imagine”.
Advertisement
Mercedes Petronas driver Lewis Hamilton, of Britain, steers his vehicle at the hairpin on his way to victory Sunday, June 12, 2016, at the Canadian Grand Prix auto race in Montreal, Sunday, June 12, 2016. MAN.
