Asked why he had not simply called Button
first to check whether the story was true, Hamilton said: “Hindsight is a
lovely thing. I tried as hard as I could to get hold of Jenson [after the
incident] but I think he had a night out so I couldn’t get hold of him. So I
sent a message, he replied and accepted it. The first thing I did here was
to go and apologise. Now my focus is on the weekend.”
At arms’s length: Hamilton and Button did not sit next to each other at
drivers’s dinner
Pressed on whether he was really serious about closing his Twitter account,
Hamilton, who has not tweeted since Monday, said he was still unsure. “I
didn’t say I was going to [give up]. But like I said maybe Twitter isn’t for
me, maybe just Instagram.”
Hamilton’s desire to brush off the incident as a regrettable mistake is
understandable but the feeling within the sport is that his tweet betrayed
his own insecurities and highlighted a basic lack of trust between the two
team mates.
Hamilton denied, though, that he and Button were now enemies or that the
incident would have any effect on the final five-race run-in. “Not at all,”
Hamilton said. “I am aware that people are now trying to say there is a rift
between Jenson and me. I just said to him, although it is probably hard to
believe after this week, that I have always respected him.
“I knew him and his dad…in ‘95 I won the British championship with his dad’s
engines so I have got a huge amount of respect for him and what he has done
in the sport. We have had a fantastic relationship all these years.
Sometimes in the heat of the moment you just say things you shouldn’t say or
that you don’t mean.”
Button, speaking later, would only say that the situation had been “dealt
with”, declining to comment any further. But the 2009 world champion is
understood to have been dismayed by Hamilton’s indiscretion. When asked
whether he felt it would have any impact on things moving forward, the 32
year-old agreed with Hamilton that it would make no difference. “I have no
issue with it. He’s entitled to his opinion. That’s it,” was his curt
observation.
We will see. At least Hamilton managed to inject some levity into proceedings
with a response to a query about Korean YouTube sensation Psy. Asked if he
would be dancing ‘Gangnam style’ this weekend, in honour of the popstar
whose video has racked up more than 400 million views worldwide and who is
an ambassador at this race, Hamilton joked that he had probably “embarrassed
himself enough this week.”.
Looking ahead to this weekend, Hamilton said he had been encouraged to learn
there had been “big problems” with his car in Japan, where he was only able
to finish fifth.
“I knew there was something wrong with it but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what
it was,” he said. “So I had the team make sure they did as much
research as they could to find out what went on. They found some big
problems which I was quite happy about because it means I am not crazy.”