Despite starting from pole position, Lewis Hamilton was unable to take the race victory and allowed his teammate to gain valuable points towards the World Drivers’ Championship title. Hamilton’s race was largely flawless, with the exception of the race start, which saw Hamilton fall to P6. Toto Wolff insists that the team is not going to play the blame game.
All eyes were at the front of the grid for the start of the Italian Grand Prix to see what would happen in turn one between the Mercedes duo. Therefore, it was extremely noticeable when pole sitter, Hamilton, was overtaken by Rosberg and Ferrari before the first corner, after a dismal start. Hamilton claimed responsibility for the poor start over team radio, but the team believes that it may not have been his fault, although they will not play the blame game and attempt to assign the blame to anyone.
Toto Wolff discussed Lewis Hamilton’s poor start:
“We obviously changed the rules this year in order to make the process more manual and more variable, and we are seeing that play out. When you start from the front row, poor starts are more visible and good ones not so obvious, so we need to be careful jumping to conclusions. Lewis said on the radio that it was his fault but he also followed all his procedures in a good way – it’s simply not an easy thing to get right and there are a lot of different factors at play. But there is no blame game: we will come together, analyse everything, learn our lessons and keep on improving so we don’t find ourselves losing places off the line.”
Heading into the Singapore Grand Prix in two weeks, Hamilton now only leads the World Drivers’ Championship by two points over Rosberg.
