05/09/2016
NEWS STORY
Having dominated throughout the weekend, the Italian Grand Prix appeared to be Lewis Hamilton's to lose.
Not only did he eclipse the Ferraris by a second, in qualifying has was almost half-a-second that his teammate.
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...
As the post-mortem gets underway, not only does Hamilton claim the poor getaway wasn't down to him, he says this is what his team has told him also.
"I'm told it wasn't driver error," he told reporters in the wake of an event that saw his teammate take an 'easy' win and thereby close the title race to just two points. "I'm told it wasn't anyone's error.
"I don't know what happened. I will try to understand it later. I did everything normal. I did the sequence exactly the same, I think I just got lots of wheelspin, a bit like Nico's start in Hockenheim.
"We have a relatively inconsistent clutch," he insisted. "In the past they told you the clutch temp and it was easier to hit targets, now it's a lot less easy to know what the clutch will be delivering or not. It has hit me quite a lot this year.
"The procedure was done exactly how I was supposed to do it but unfortunately the wheels were spinning from the get-go."
However, while Hamilton claims the team says the poor start was not his fault, team boss Toto Wolff suggests otherwise.
"Lewis said on the radio that it was his fault but he also followed all his procedures in a good way," said the Austrian, "it's simply not an easy thing to get right and there are a lot of different factors at play.
"There is no blame game," he added, "we will come together, analyse everything, learn our lessons and keep on improving so we don't find ourselves losing places off the line."
In a subsequent interview, Wolff said: "The only thing I heard was in the race, he said 'don't worry guys I got it wrong in the start'.
"In the heat of the moment after losing a race to his team mate a driver will say things. Once we have seen all the data we will address internally what needs to be done."