Hamilton
maintained that he had been content to yield to Rosberg’s surge, explaining:
“I said to Ross at the end that I wanted to let him past. But he said:
‘Absolutely not. When I tell you what I want you to do you have to stick by
it.’ So I’m glad I did, and that I didn’t get in trouble with Ross. Hats off
to Nico, he was the driver of the day for me.”
The 2008 world champion confirmed that he would speak to Rosberg and offer
his apologies. “He is a great team-mate,” Hamilton said. “I told him that he
did a fantastic job. Nico deserved to be where I am. With the position in
the championship the team thought it was logical to stay in position, but
Nico drove a smarter and more controlled race than me. Would I let him past
in the future? I probably would.”
Trying desperately to preserve cordial relations at Mercedes, he said: “Nico
and I go back a long, long way and we have a good understanding. I went up
to him and said: ‘You know I don’t feel great. You did an amazing job and I
appreciate your support.”
Hamilton, having enjoyed a superb start from third and successfully fending
off a charging Jenson Button in fourth in the early phases, also experienced
a most unfortunate reacquaintance with his former team as he drove directly
into the McLaren
pit box.
As the mechanics bashfully ushered him on, it indeed seemed that while you
could take the boy out of McLaren, you could not take McLaren out of the
boy. After all the tensions around his departure last summer from the house
that Ron Dennis built, it was difficult to envisage how Hamilton could have
made a more glaring error.
At least girlfriend Nicole Scherzinger, smiling as she watched it all unfold
on the monitors, appeared to see the amusing side.
So, too, did McLaren, who described the moment on Twitter as an “unexpected
twist”, before adding: “Feel free to pop in and say ‘hi’ any time!”
Trying to make light of the incident, even though it cost him valuable time in
hunting down the Red Bulls, Hamilton said: “I don’t know how I got it so
wrong – it was just an old habit. I drove for that team for six years and
have always seen their tops, and I just pulled in. I realised I was in the
wrong one when they waved me on. It was not a great feeling.”
Button, meanwhile, suffered an undignified end to his ambitions of finishing
in the points when a problem with refitting his front left tyre led to his
stopping in the pit lane and eventually retiring.