…AS MERCEDES BINS IT
F1’s new star takes first victory as Hamilton and Rosberg crash out
through the corner. He didn’t have the power.
“Where he positioned the car was a car width to the right of the racing line. At the speed I was catching him, I had to decide whether to go left – which was a small gap – or right.
“The inside line is always the line you’d go for and it was a much bigger gap, so I went for it.
“I got there and I had part of my wing and part of my wheel alongside, within the white line. Then obviously that gap diminished pretty quickly.
“But it wasn’t a case of the door was closed and I decided to go across the grass. I saw a gap and I went for it, and that’s what racing drivers do.
“The feeling I have is just disappointment for the team. What’s important is we just go to the next race and try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Wolff refused to apportion blame to either driver. “When we looked at the incident, and there are people in the team with racing experience and an opinion, the opinion differed between all of us,” he said.
“What I take home is that it was an incident that could’ve been avoided by both sides. It’s so difficult to really attribute percentages of blame.
“It was definitely lesson enough. It’s painful for them to see that we have lost what could have been a great result.”
However, Mercedes nonexecutive chairman Niki Lauda was less diplomatic, blaming Hamilton for the crash.
“It’s very simple for me,” he said. “It was a miscalculation in Lewis’s head, I blame him more than Nico.
“But for the team and for Mercedes it is unacceptable.
“Lewis was too aggressive to pass him and why should Nico give him room? He was in the lead. It is completely unnecessary and for me the disaster is that all Mercedes are out after two corners.”
The stewards investigated the incident after the race, but deemed it to be a racing incident.