Hamilton threw away what had looked set to be a certain win with a poor start after he had taken pole position with a scintillating performance on Saturday.
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Rosberg jumps for joy on the podium after winning the Italian Grand Prix yesterday. Rosberg had to take an early lead after losing the pole position to his teammate in the qualifying race and he did exactly that on Sunday.
An engine change forced Hamilton to start from the back of the grid in Belgium, which in turn meant he could only manage a third-place finish, with Rosberg taking the win easily. It was also the seventh win for the German driver in the 2016 season. Lewis Hamilton has put that formula to fine use over the past few years, but the tiniest of misjudgments here was catastrophic. Hamilton now worked his way back up as he first passed through Ricciardo through Curva Grande taking the fifth place. The one person the Merc drivers have trouble passing if they fall behind is their team-mate.
Fellow teammate Lewis Hamilton suffered a poor start at the beginning of the race, dropping from first to fifth.
When the lights went out at Monza, Hamilton seemed to be moving in slow motion as Rosberg and four other cars streamed past him before the first corner.
That left Rosberg leading Hamilton by around 11 seconds, a margin which the Brit managed to close but only very gradually until he made a chicane error on lap 41.
“But looking at the big picture, we have a perfectly balanced championship battle, with two points between Nico and Lewis after 14 races”.
Hamilton said he went through his start procedures correctly, but this had created too much torque, which in turn resulted in wheel-spin. “The fans deserve nothing else than the top spot and I think we can give it to them in the next couple of years”. But obviously today machine and driver got it wrong.
Soon after the start, Renault’s Jolyon Palmer and Sauber’s Felipe Nasr made contact, sending both cars back to the pits. Nobody. Because if you start to blame people this is when it starts going downhill because people will try to protect their a*** and make sure they have a conservative system in place rather that putting the best developments on the vehicle.
Hamilton had been on pole position by almost 0.5 seconds – a massive margin on a track with relatively few corners and his dominance left Rosberg curt in his media exchanges afterwards.
OK, it’s not a Gilles Villeneuve-Rene Arnoux duel to the finish, but it’s something!
“It is a great audience here like every year it is just incredible”.
An otherwise dominant weekend was ruined by one blemish, a bad getaway, which immediately rendered victory in the Italian Grand Prix practically impossible.
Hamilton holds on to his lead in the 2016 Drivers’ Championship but by a very small gap now.
It was also the 50th podium finish of Rosberg’s career and prevented Hamilton completing a cherished hat-trick of Italian wins, to equal a feat achieved only once before by Juan Manuel Fangio in the 1950s, and register his 50th career victory.
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Don’t miss the F1 Report for the analysis of the Italian GP.
