The team and Lewis were already in a very comfortable situation. This is not the same as a safety car restart near the end of the race in Monza. It is Monte Carlo, a track where it is almost impossible to overtake.
I experienced my own share of strategic mishaps, if not anything quite as blatant as Sunday, and it is hard not to let it affect your trust in the team. The Canadian Grand Prix in 1997 springs to mind.
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I was leading comfortably, but had a small, manageable blister on one of the rear tyres. After plenty of back-and-forth with the pit wall, I saw no need to come in, but Ron Dennis, the McLaren team principal, wanted to take the safe option.
It was a slow stop, and while I was in the pits Olivier Panis crashed, breaking both his legs. As a result, the race was stopped and I ended up falling right down the field. What should have been an easy victory ended with me seventh, more than half a minute down.
Lewis Hamilton finds it hard to hide his disappointment alongside winner Nico Rosberg
I was bitterly disappointed because you put so much effort into winning. It was the same here for Lewis. He was utterly dominant all weekend. People say that the cars are not as difficult to drive as they used to be, but someone still has to be the fastest man. Lewis was flawless.
It is hard to imagine him dealing with such a bitter defeat so well a few years ago. When he stopped at Portier on the slow-down lap, my reaction was he was about to do what Ayrton Senna did in 1988: walk back to his apartment and not be seen for several days. But he did not over-egg it.
The Lewis of 2011 for example would have in all probability lashed out at the team. It might have made great headlines, but here was a professional sportsman, who is paid a lot of money, being the absolute professional. Even after what could almost be described as a tragedy – as Nico Rosberg pretty much acknowledged, the wrong man won – Lewis showed how much he has matured.
Lewis Hamilton’s unnecessary pit-stop cost him dear
In a strange way, I take a lot of solace in the scale of the shock at this defeat. The reason we are all so stunned is not because a driver has had a technical problem, it is because a seemingly easy victory has been taken away because of human error. That is what makes sport.
It humanises Formula One and reminds us that the crux of this sport is not technology. It is people. We’ve become so engrossed in all the technical side – look at how good our battery storage is, and so on – we need a story like this to bring us back to what really captivates people.
In the end, it does not matter whether we are running diesel engines, turbos, V12s, V10s. It’s the fastest form of racing with man and machine sweating, and fighting, to beat the rest. That’s what we want to be entertained by. There is actually a lot to take heart from.
The stance of Mercedes simply adds to the story. They immediately held their hands up – it was such an obvious mistake – but we are not used to that level of honesty in Formula One. I do not think Niki Lauda, the team’s chairman, is physically capable of not saying what he thinks.
It all means that, astonishingly, Nico is just 10 points behind in the championship even though he has been comprehensively outgunned so far this year. His father won the title with just one grand prix victory that season, so maybe we should not be surprised.
Lewis will come back in Canada knowing that he has the speed, but it will take time to heal the wounds and rebuild his total trust in the team.