Defending champ and standings leader Lewis Hamilton clocked the fastest time at qualifying in Monza by half a second over rival Nico Rosberg.
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The world champion dropped to sixth at the first corner and despite fighting back to second and closing on Rosberg he could not challenge for the win.
Despite having shouldered the responsibility for his poor start, Hamilton admitted he only did so because he wanted to ease any concerns his team in the garage may have been having as a result.
How did Hamilton throw it away?
Hamilton was able to pass Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo and Williams’ Valtteri Bottas during the first stint, and a one-stop strategy took care of the two Ferrari cars meaning that Hamilton was able to finish second albeit 15 seconds behind his Mercedes team mate Nico Rosberg.
Sebastian Vettel came third, 5.9 seconds further adrift, ahead of his Ferrari team-mate Kimi Raikkonen to the delight of the home fans.
Hamilton will be bidding to register a hat-trick of Italian wins today with his 50th career victory, to extend his nine-point lead in the title race ahead of Rosberg.
Rosberg, who could only finish fourth last year while Hamilton retired with a “freak” power unit component failure, said: “We can’t go there with too much confidence because we were miles off last year”.
“If I thought about a 43-point lead going to 19 points behind, then I would lose sleep over that, so I don’t think about it and I just enjoy winning races”.
All the other leading teams were on a two-stop and while there was excitement with some battles here and there, it was a largely mundane race.
Williams’ Valtteri Bottas finished fifth with a best time of 1:22.388s, while Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo will join the Fin to occupy the third row.
Riccardo’s teammate Max Verstappen claimed eighth in the race, just ahead of the pair of Force India cars driven by Sergio Perez and Nico Hulkenberg.
Earlier Saturday it was announced that former F1 champion Jenson Button will not be on the F1 grid in 2017.
Button started 14th, two places behind team-mate Fernando Alonso, but a bad start left him 20th on the first lap, while the Spaniard moved up to ninth. “I don’t want to blame anybody – not Lewis, not the engineers, not the system – but we have to address that topic because it lost him the race”.
“I had an awesome start and that made the win”, he said.
Referring to the championship, in which there are seven races remaining, Rosberg said: “The race is on”.
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Hamilton said: “It was the start. The flat spot is minimal, you can’t really feel it, so I don’t think it will be a problem”. It’s hard to overtake here.
