HAMILTON IS MASTER OF MONZA
Champion silences hostile crowd with drive of a lifetime
LEWIS HAMILTON stood alone and supreme, a Brit in a fog of red flares, booed and hissed at by the partisans below as God Save
the Queen struck up to honour a victory that will taunt Monza for ever. In front of the most sentimental Formula One crowd in the world, Hamilton had just planted his flag on the summit of grand prix greatness by passing Kimi Raikkonen eight laps from the end to rob Ferrari of an almost certain triumph.
His drive combined patience and dash in an inferior car and amid local hostility. As he passed Raikkonen, there was briefly disbelieving silence in the stands.
The victory from third on the grid lifted Hamilton 30 points clear at the top of the drivers’ standings.
His chief rival for the championship, Sebastian Vettel, finished fourth — or virtually nowhere. ‘Ferrari have got a problem,’ said Damon Hill, champion in 1996, ‘and it is called Lewis Hamilton.’
That is true. But Ferrari cut their own throats after locking out the front row. They failed to ensure that Vettel, rather than Raikkonen, who is out of the championship picture, was first to the opening bend. Had they choreographed the start in that ruthless way, Vettel would not have tangled with Hamilton three corners later, when the German hung on too grimly to his position, damaged his front wing and went back to 19th.
Wisely, the stewards did not penalise Vettel — it was a racing incident. That said, he should have yielded space as Hamilton, whose Mercedes had surged slightly ahead by the time of their impact, stuck to the racing line.
Nico Rosberg, the 2016 champion, said: ‘It was 100 per cent Sebastian’s fault. Hamilton gave him all the room. He’s not going to become world champion if he keeps doing these things.’ True. These slight miscalculations by Vettel are adding up — five this season — while Hamilton is clinical, at the peak of his talents.
At this stage of his career, he thrives on pressure like no peer. For one, he rose above the intimidation of the crowd. ‘Once again we are in the snake pit,’ he noted before the race. Afterwards, he thanked British fans for waving their Union flags in enemy territory.
‘They are my fuel,’ he said as he celebrated a fifth Italian Grand Prix victory that put him level l with Michael Schumacher r and ahead of everyone else.
‘That support, plus the negativity of the home crowd, drove me on. My fans were the miracle workers today.’
After the Vettel skirmish, and when an early safety car had peeled off, Ferrari’s No 1 was given an object lesson in how to give other cars adequate space. Hamilton took the lead off Raikkonen cleanly at the first corner with the help of the tow, and then judiciously ceded it back at the fourth for the same reason.
That was the patience of Lewis at work. His car largely uninjured by the brush with Vettel, Hamilton then spent the first half of the race a second or so behind Raikkonen. After the Finn came in to be re-shod, Mercedes kept Hamilton out and he put in some fine, bristling laps.
But Raikkonen was no slouch on his new tyres and, when Hamilton re- emerged after his own stop, the Ferrari man was some six seconds clear in the lead.
Hamilton’s team-mate Valtteri Bottas, who had not then stopped, delayed Raikkonen — a brilliant team-minded act of self-sacrifice. The tactic allowed Hamilton, himself pressing forward with relentless energy, to get close enough to wriggle into the lead on lap 45. He went round Raikkonen on the outside of the
first corner and made it stick decisively on the second bend.
That was the dash of Hamilton, putting enough faith in his ability to pull off a move that, if badly executed, would have seen him lose a massive chunk of his championship lead to Vettel.
While Hamilton now takes momentum into the next round at Singapore on Sunday week, an inquest has opened at Ferrari.
They have the strongest car but cannot make that advantage pay, a conundrum for the men who have taken over from the recently deceased Sergio Marchionne at the pinnacle of the team. This being Monza, the new Ferrari chairman John Elkann, favourite grandson of Gianni Agnelli, and chief executive Louis Camilleri were tracked by TV cameras every step of their jaunts down the paddock. Their newspaper reading will go down like arsenic this morning.
That is for them to worry about. For those of us who have followed Hamilton’s career from the first turn, it was a day to toast one of his most remarkable victories.
It was, in the circumstances, close to the drive of a lifetime.