Hamilton initially appeared to take the blame for the poor getaway over the team radio, but afterwards said he wasn’t actually sure what had happened.
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“I’m feeling great”, he said on the Monza podium.
“Today we did the best we could and got the most out of the vehicle.” said Raikkonen “For sure we would have been more satisfied with the first row, but this is the maximum we could achieve”.
“The start was the big opportunity and that worked out fantastically”, Rosberg said.
Hamilton dropped to sixth place before the first chicane and had to fight his way back to the front.
Britain’s Lewis Hamilton struggled to explain his calamitous start to the Italian Grand Prix which ruined any chance of a 50th career win and ultimately saw his championship lead cut by rival Nico Rosberg. I don’t really know what happened at the start but obviously I’ll try and understand it later. “So it was all there”.
The Williams driver won 11 races during his time with Ferrari and came desperately close to the world title in 2008, when he lost the championship by one point to Lewis Hamilton in a dramatic season finale in Brazil. The race is on with Lewis.
Back in 2014, Rosberg converted just three of his 11 poles into race wins, a historically bad mark.
Hamilton finished 15 seconds down on his Mercedes team-mate.
“It’s hard to overtake here”, Hamilton said. “Second was the best l could do after the start l got”.
“We have a relatively inconsistent clutch. It is always going to be a great battle and I look forward to what is to come”, he said from the podium as an army of Ferrari fans flooded the pit straight. For Ferrari, Sebastian Vettel was third, some 5.9 seconds behind, while Kimi Raikkonen in the other Ferrari was in 4th.
Rosberg celebrated with a series of fist pumps when he got out of his auto, playfully jabbing at a TV camera.
Hamilton fell as low as sixth off the line and, on a one-stop strategy, had to exhaust precious tyre life fighting through to second behind eventual race victor Nico Rosberg. It is also the German driver’s 21st career win.
Hamilton, meanwhile, passed Daniel Ricciardo through Curve Grande to move into fifth and then got a good run out of Parabolica to slingshot past Valtteri Bottas for fourth.
There were four retirements, with Sauber’s Felipe Nasr and Renault’s Jolyon Palmer going out early on after contact on the opening lap.
The Briton, also chasing a hat-trick of wins at the Monza circuit outside Milan, enjoyed a sunny afternoon with a fastest lap of one minute 22.801 seconds on the supersoft tyres after being second to Rosberg in the morning. Both men took super-soft and then soft for their opening two stints, but while Bottas took on softs at his final stint Ricciardo moved onto the super-softs.
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Force India’s Sergio Perez and Nico Hulkenberg took eighth and tenth, with the Williams of Felipe Massa sandwiched in between in ninth.
