Hamilton, who effectively lost the race in the first 20 metres when the lights went out, now leads the title race with 250 points ahead of Rosberg on 248 and knows, from the look on his face, that he has a battle to stay in front. The victory also prevented Hamilton completing a hat-trick of Italian wins, a feat achieved only by Juan Manuel Fangio in the 1950s. The gap was 19 just two races ago. The British driver later confessed to his team that the slow start was his own fault and there wasn’t anything wrong with the vehicle.
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He said: “To be honest, I said that to reassure my engineers who I knew would be feeling nervous”.
Hamilton added: “Yes, the start was the decider for this race and then I had to climb back and score points. I did everything as normal”.
“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 fifth and sixth positions went to Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo and Williams’ Valtteri Bottas respectively.
Indeed by the time Hamilton eventually took the Finn on lap 11 he was already 11 seconds behind his Mercedes team-mate.
That was the unwanted scenario in prospect for both title contenders Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg ahead of a meeting at the team factory at Brackley on Tuesday when a series of bad getaways from the grid goes under the technical microscope.
“Nico drove a great race. and did what he had to do”. Once you’re out in front here, it’s relatively plain and simple, keeping the auto on the track.
“All he had to do was match some of my times and he was sorted”.
Rosberg’s first victory at the historic circuit outside Milan was his seventh of the season, one more than Hamilton, and 21st of his career as well as second in a row after Belgium last weekend. The only question as it is week in and week out is which Mercedes driver won, Hamilton or Rosberg.
Wolff said he had no interest in getting to the bottom of who has been at fault for the problems at starts this year. “But he has had many good starts and it can happen”. It is never easy, but it wasn’t the toughest race.
Jenson Button will not be racing here in 2017 after he announced he is stepping down from first-team duties for McLaren at the end of this season, and following another middling display here, in which he crossed the line 12th, the Englishman will probably be looking forward to the break.
“The reason the rules were changed a year ago was to give more responsibility to the driver and make it more variable”, Wolff said.
But he could yet return to the grid in 2018 after revealing McLaren has an option to put him back in the auto. We have made improvements so you’ve seen better starts, but we are still caught out by the random variation that we have from one start to another.
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“I feel that part of me is Italian in a way, because I have a lot of friends here and I grew up with the culture”.
