“I knew my engineers would be anxious and nervous of how the start went, so that’s why I tried to put their minds at ease”, Hamilton said. The German driver won by a massive lead of 15 seconds over Hamilton who recovered to the second place after dropping to sixth.
Advertisement
“We ll try to get as much information and learn as much as we can to try and make sure in the remaining seven races that we re not struggling to get off the line from pole positions”. I got up to second and that is the best I could do. “I don’t want to blame anybody – not Lewis, not the engineers, not the system – but we have to address that topic because it lost him the race”.
When Rosberg suggested the 2016 rule changes meant variable starts were normally down to driver performance, Hamilton argued that there were still many technical reasons why a getaway might be slow. I think overall I’m pretty happy, not so much with the beginning of the lap but I think our race pace is better than the gap in qualifying indicates, so we’ll see.
The outcome of this year s drivers world championship may be decided by the capricious nature of Mercedes clutches unless the team finds a reliable solution to its ongoing poor starts.
Consequently, all that prevented him taking a lights-to-flag victory at Monza and thereby further extending his championship lead was the intervention of the weather gods, a first corner melee or a poor start. I don’t really know what happened at the start, though obviously I will try to understand it later.
Pole-sitter Hamilton, 31, was bidding to become the first driver since the great Juan Manuel Fangio in the 1950s to claim a hat-trick of consecutive victories at the so-called Temple of Speed.
“The reason the rules were changed a year ago was to give more responsibility to the driver and make it more variable”, Wolff said.
Back in April, executive director Toto Wolff said the team was working to improve their clutches, per Motorsport.com’s Jonathan Noble. Every now and again we get a drastic variation. He persevered however and was able finish the race in seventh.
“I could see Nico pulling away and I knew from quite an early stage that winning the race would not be possible”, said Hamilton.
“He is a fair racer and had seen me in the mirrors so I knew he wouldn’t turn in, so I had a go”. Palmer retired, while Nasr came back out briefly to serve a 10-second penalty for causing the accident.
Mercedes refused to be drawn into a blame game after a awful start by Lewis Hamilton at the Italian Grand Prix scuppered his chance of a 50th career win and blew the world championship wide open.
Advertisement
Putting his Red Bull sixth on the grid was all that could have been hoped for, with Mercedes way out in front and Ferrari and Williams both set up to make the most of the fastest track in Formula One.
