Lewis Hamilton has said that his poor start to today's Italian Grand Prix was down to the inconsistency of the Mercedes clutch rather than his own error, as well as that this inconsistency is the team's only weakness.
After dropping from pole position to sixth place at the start Hamilton was able to recover to second place behind his team-mate Nico Rosberg before the end, but afterwards said that his poor start was explained by clutch inconsistency, which has hit the team previously this season.
"I'm told it wasn't a driver error, but it wasn't anyone's error. It's just we continue to have an inconsistency with our clutch," he said.
"I was told the procedure was exactly how we're supposed to do it, but unfortunately we just had over-delivery of torque and the wheels were spinning from the get-go.
"We've seen it with Nico in Hockenheim; it's hit me quite a lot this year."
Lewis added that changes made for this season to put more of the start procedure into the hands of the drivers also was proving a struggle.
"In the past we were able to be told our clutch temperature and it was easier to hit our target as well" he said, "but now it's a lot less easy to know what your clutch is going to be delivering and what it's not."
The Englishman promised that the team would give the clutch consistency problem special focus in the days to come, as it is in his view the Mercedes team's only weakness right now.
"I can assure you that on Tuesday it'll be the single thing we're talking about, because everything else we're doing really well," he said.
"Of course we never stop improving and learning. Today we would have learnt again…They'll [the team will] be working very hard, it's not a quick fix.
"We have made improvements, so we have seen more consistent better starts, but we are still caught out by the random variation that we have from one weekend to another.
"We're doing practice starts all weekend, they're varying a little bit, and sometimes every now and then we get a drastic variation on the grid. So it is something we need to work on."
Discussion about this post