When the race is over and the finish line is crossed, each driver’s engineer opens the radio to inform him of the result and congratulate him or send him encouragement. When instead of the track engineer the one who communicates with the driver is the team manager, it is a sign that the matter is bigger, and it is what can be deduced from what happened at the end of the Emilia Romagna GP.
After qualifying 13th on Friday and finishing 14th in the sprint race, Lewis Hamilton completed his gray weekend without gaining positions in Sunday’s race despite retirements ahead.
In 14th place, far from the points and doubled by his great rival from 2021 Max Verstappen, Hamilton was one of the few drivers who could barely overtake at the Imola event despite running for many laps behind Pierre Gasly, who defended himself with claw to leave the English behind.
And after seeing the checkered flag, the Mercedes team opened the radio:
– Toto Wolff : “Lewis, hi, I’m sorry for what you had to drive today, I know this car is undrivable and it’s not what we deserve, the points and the result. We’ll get out of this, but this was a terrible race.”
– Lewis Hamilton : “Yeah, don’t worry, Toto. Let’s keep working hard.”
– Toto Wolff : “Sí, we will recover from this one”.
Video: Wolff apologizes to Hamilton at Imola
(Click on the link if the DAZN tweet does not appear, which you can only see in Spain)
Hamilton, who was already sunk on Saturday after the sprint race admitting that he did not see the light at the end of the tunnel, could not hide his discomfort at the worst weekend he has been remembered since he has been in Formula 1.
And it is that beyond the problems of the Mercedes W13 , his teammate George Russell managed to be fourth and already has 21 points, slightly less than the 28 that the seven-time champion adds after four races.
In fact, when DAZN F1 interviewed him in the media ‘corralito’, he responded with a few words to Melissa Jiménez :
Question : “Hello Hamilton, difficult race. We have seen that even though your pace was higher than Gasly’s, overtaking was very difficult.”
Hamilton : “How? Even if the rhythm was what…?”
Question : “Yes, with Gasly, it was difficult to overtake, every time you got closer it seemed very difficult”
Hamilton : “Pretty much impossible, unfortunately”
Question : “How do you feel about the car, Lewis? Because we heard Toto on the radio apologize for the car.”
Hamilton : “It’s tough, it’s tough”
Question : “And what do you expect for Miami?”
Hamilton : “Not much”
Formula 1 makes a break now until the Miami GP, the next appointment of the world championship on the weekend of May 7 and 8. Enough time to analyze many things…
