Valtteri Bottas was Williams’ lead runner in sixth, split from team mate Felipe Massa by the Red Bull of Max Verstappen and the Force India of Sergio Perez, whose team mate Nico Hulkenberg completed the top ten.
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Rosberg has won back-to-back races following Hamilton’s grid penalty and third place at Spa, but the German denied the “tide” of the title battle was now going his way.
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”.
Rosberg also trails Hamilton in the driver’s championship by just 2 points with 248 to Hamilton’s 250.
Meanwhile, Hamilton eventually fought his way through from sixth at the end of the opening lap to take the runners-up spot, 15 seconds back.
Hamilton said: “We have been smashing the weekends, been quickest, dominant all weekend and then less than a tenth of a second decided the race”.
“I knew my engineers would be anxious and nervous of how the start went so that is why I tried to put their mind at ease [by accepting the blame]”, he said.
The crowd in Monza is known for invading the track at the checkered flag and after 11 years in Formula One and many more as the son of F1 champion Keke Rosberg the multi-national Mercedes driver wanted to thoroughly enjoy his first victory at the “Temple of Speed”.
“My belief to win individual races is as high as ever, and I showed that on Sunday”. “I got up to second and that was the best I could do with such a loss at the start”. I don’t really know what happened at the start, though obviously I will try to understand it later.
Thereafter Rosberg drove with the same precision he demonstrated last week in Belgium and was able to ease away on his soft Pirelli tyres as the supersoft-shod Ferraris of Vettel and Raikkonen led Bottas and Ricciardo at the end of the lap.
The 31-year-old began to claw his way back up towards first place and after the Mercedes pair had come back out from their pit-stop, the gap had been reduced to 9.1secs. But yeah, this year has been a harder year for us with out clutch.
“I’m looking forward to Singapore, which was our weakest race previous year”.
Hamilton appeared to get bogged down off the line, getting passed by both Ferraris, Bottas and Ricciardo into Turn 1.
Of the rest, Haas F1’s Romain Grosjean finished just outside the points in P11, with McLaren-Honda driver Jenson Button 12th and the other Haas entry of Esteban Gutierrez 13th.
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We all give McLaren a lot of (deserved) stick because of the unreliability of their auto in recent years, but credit where it’s due – Fernando Alonso logged the quickest lap time of the race.
