Rosberg has had the thrill of not only beating his teammate and rival Lewis Hamilton in the Belgian and Italian grands prix, but now finds himself only two points behind in the race for the world drivers’ championship.
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But a poor opening to the race, after a similar start cost the world champion probable victories at the opening two rounds in Australia and Bahrain, was to prove damaging on Sunday.
The Italian Grand Prix marked Formula One’s final stop in Europe with Singapore playing host to the first of seven concluding flyaway races.
Suddenly the momentum which has slowly been slipping away from Rosberg after he won the opening four races of the year is falling back in his favour.
With the win, Rosberg’s second in a row, he moves within 2 points of Hamilton in the drivers’ standings.
Second place came about when Ferrari elected to keep to a two-stop strategy, enabling Hamilton to pass while both Vettel and Raikkonen were in the pits.
At the start, Hamilton saw not only Rosberg but also the Ferrari team of Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen sweep past him, followed by Valtteri Bottas.
‘We are never blaming anybody, ‘ said Mercedes boss Toto Wolff.
“I do remember a bunch of cars coming by but, as I said, I did the sequence, everything exactly the same and yeah, I think I just got lots of wheelspin”.
After an initially normal start, the polesitter was then very slow off the grid, leaving him swamped by other cars getting around him before he finally went through the first chicane in sixth place.
“It was lost at the start”, Hamilton said.
“Today we did the best we could and got the most out of the auto.” said Raikkonen “For sure we would have been more satisfied with the first row, but this is the maximum we could achieve”.
“As you’ve seen with Nico and me quite a few times, we need to work on it”. “My belief to win individual races is as high as ever and I showed it today again and that’s it, because its my best approach”.
“The start wasn’t great, but it is still a great day for Mercedes-Benz and I am proud to be a part of it”. However, Hamilton using DRS on the front straight sped past Bottas, now just 11 seconds behind teammate Rosberg, who continued lead the race in the distance.
‘A driver in the heat of the moment, after losing a race to a team-mate, will say things. We have made improvements, so we have seen more consistent, better starts, but we are still caught out by the random variation that we have from one weekend to the other. I was hoping that he’ll go on the brakes a bit sooner but he didn’t.
“They’ll be working very hard”.
Hamilton knew immediately it would be an uphill struggle, falling to sixth from pole position with huge black tyre marks left on the famous Monza tarmac.
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“It was wonderful. He came from so far back”.
