The Hamilton-Leclerc duel
With the start from the second row of the grid, Ferrari at Monza had a concrete chance to play some cards in the slipstream game at the start. But the duel between Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton at the first chicane drastically ruled out this possibility and the two almost made contact exiting the second corner. The Monegasque forcefully took third place, escorting his teammate into the escape road, who collapsed to eleventh place.
In short, a decidedly suboptimal start management in Ferrari’s home race – which anyway seemed to be in evident difficulty throughout the weekend.
Lewis does not appreciate the absence of engagement rules
In the interviews given to the media after the race, Lewis Hamilton spoke about the duel with Leclerc: “It was very negative for the team and set us quite far back in the standings. You know, I don’t race dirty. I have always raced cleanly and fairly and have always left space. So there’s no need to worry about me. I came to the team and have always tried to be respectful and not put the team in danger“.
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Hamilton then criticized the current management of the internal rivalry: “This is all I can say as far as I’m concerned. You have to talk to Fred about the decisions that are made here. It’s all in the engagement rules. When I was at Mercedes, we had written engagement rules. So we never really had big problems, maybe a couple of times with Nico, but most of the time everything went well. Here instead there are no rules. I think it’s something we will have to try to solve“.
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