Lewis Hamilton congratulated Max Verstappen and his team for doing a better job last weekend, but warns that he and his team must do everything to prevent such a bad weekend from happening again.
Hamilton had a bad weekend on the streets of Monte Carlo as he was about half a second slower on Saturday in all three parts of qualifying than teammate Bottas who has 2:2 head-to-head with him in qualifying on this track (2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021).
Bottas qualified third behind Leclerc and Verstappen, but due to Leclerc’s problems he started second and was on his way to second place in the race until a tyre change disaster when mechanics couldn’t take off his front right wheel.
Hamilton had a frustrating race from sixth place and lost positions to Perez and Vettel after Mercedes’ poor strategic decision to invite him to pit first, ahead of his direct rivals, and finished seventh, despite problems for Leclerc and Bottas.
“Congratulations to Max and his team, they did a better job today,” said Hamilton.
“For our team, it’s through our losses and our mistakes that we always grow stronger. This has definitely been a poor weekend overall in terms of our performance, but this team has shown time and time again, how we come back fighting.”
“There’s no finger pointing, we win and we lose together – we just need to find our feet and stay cool, we have 18 races left and there’s a long way to go in this fight.”
“We’ll be working hard because we need to make sure this doesn’t happen again. There’s no reason why we should be performing like this on any weekend with all the experience we have together as a team.”
“We’ll have some good discussions internally, it’s painful to learn these lessons but we’ve done it many times before.”
‘Lewis just didn’t have the pace’
Team boss Toto Wolff says that with Hamilton ‘they just didn’t have the pacein the car’ and that the thing is ‘very simple’.
“With Lewis, we just didn’t have the pace in the car – it’s as simple as that. The undercut looked like the only feasible way of clearing Gasly and there wasn’t any mistake, the outlap was good, the pit stop was OK but it just wasn’t enough.
You have to take a weekend like this on the chin – today we lost a few points but this is a long championship, it is going to swing back and forth and in the end we will see in Abu Dhabi who has their nose ahead. We will regroup and look back, as much as it hurts, to learn the lessons and come back stronger.
“With Lewis it was always going to be a difficult Sunday because we didn’t get him far enough up the grid on Saturday,” said Shovlin.
“However, we’d hoped to move forward but our attempt at an undercut failed and Lewis was then helpless as he got dragged back with Gasly whilst other cars overcut them both. We’ve got a busy week ahead of us as we need to get on top of many of our issues ahead of the next race in Baku.”
“However, our difficult days always lead to us learning and improving and we’re looking forward to getting back to the race track in few days’ time.”
