“I am not thinking about the championship”, said Rosberg.
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“I felt good on qualifying pace, it’s just that Lewis had his best day of the year and when he has his best day of the year it is hard to beat him”, he explained.
Nico Rosberg has admitted he will not be able to sleep if he entertains the thought of stopping Lewis Hamilton from winning a third consecutive championship.
“You’re the best in the world”, Rosberg told the crowd in Italian after the singalong. The German driver capitalised on his teammate’s poor start and raced to his first Italian Grand Prix title at Monza on Sunday.
Triple world champion Hamilton, who had been on pole position as favourite to take his 50th career victory and third in a row here, finished second after a slow start gifted Rosberg the race.
“No race is never straightforward”, said Rosberg. “I’m feeling great. The race is on with Lewis of course, it’s always going to be a great battle and I look forward to what’s to come”, he was quoted as saying by the official website of F1. “So it was all there”. At one stage Rosberg led by 43 points and now, after two victories in a week, has all-but drawn level with his team-mate with just seven races to go.
Suddenly the momentum which had slowly been slipping away from Rosberg after he won the opening four races of the year is falling back in his favour. “I’m sure Ferrari will come back”, Vettel said. But, yeah, it’s hard to overtake here. “We [Mercedes] continue to have an inconsistency”.
Wolff said: “In this team, I will never blame anybody – not the driver, not the engineer, nobody”. And by the time he had leapfrogged Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen, courtesy of stopping for tyres on one less occasion than the Ferrari pair, the gap stood at 15 seconds.
Rosberg celebrated with a series of fist pumps when he got out of his vehicle, playfully jabbing at a TV camera.
The 36-year-old McLaren driver, who won the world championship in 2009, has competed in every grand prix season since the turn of the century and, following a career which has yielded almost 300 starts, 15 victories and 50 podiums, revealed on Saturday that he will not participate in the sport in a full-time role next year.
The Monza drive was the first time that Nico Rosberg won at this circuit.
“It’s tough to take when you lose a race because of such a poor start.” said Hamilton “From there it was just about managing the tires during the first stint and I was delighted to get back up to second after the first stop”. “At the end the answer was really clear”. With it, Ricciardo ended the race in fifth place while Bottas had to contend for sixth.
Toro Rosso’s Carlos Sainz, Force India’s Nico Hulkenberg and Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo were the other drivers to test it out. It’s going to be a long race, tricky for the tires, and a lot of things can happen; we have to put ourselves up there and if something happens we have to try to maximize our result.
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Don’t miss the F1 Report for the analysis of the Italian GP.
