Hamilton: “I am devastated. The duel with Leclerc? Blocking the positions would have gone better…”

A fratricidal duel at the first chicane

Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton started from the second row of the Italian Grand Prix, so it was reasonable to expect a Ferrari attacking the top positions thanks to the slipstream game at Monza. Instead, the two Ferrari drivers dueled with each other at the first chicane, resulting in Leclerc not leaving space to Hamilton on exit, who found himself in the gravel and dropped from fourth to eleventh position.

The Englishman then tried to come back and at one point in the race he even found himself third, but Ferrari’s lack of competitiveness made him finish in sixth place, 24 seconds behind the winner Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who had started 19th.
Hamilton thus loses further ground in the driver standings, and now he is 79 points behind his successor at Mercedes.

Hamilton is devastated

“Obviously I am devastated by the result,” Hamilton said to Sky UK without beating around the bush, adding: “We worked hard at the factory to bring upgrades and reduce the gap… But I had nothing and it was a very tough sixth place. It will be one of those races we will leave and think about what we could have done better, but we are simply not up to the guys in front.”

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About the battle with Leclerc he explained: “I only thought about the team. Clearly, we were both in a decent position… If we had blocked the positions, we would have been in a much better position. We lost a lot of ground… Scoring so few points for the team is really sad,” Hamilton concluded.

Translated from

Antonelli, the first words after the triumph: “At the restart I thought ‘I have to win this one’”