“I could feel the home fans spurring me on”
Before the end, I had to start saving fuel: you have to lift and coast, which means the brake temperatures drop. So I had no brakes, and that’s why I kept locking up. That allowed Mark [Webber] to slip ahead of me and meant I was defending from Felipe [Massa] in the closing laps.
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I got a poor start and lost out to both Ferraris.
After that, it was a long race – the team asked me to stay out for as long as I could, and I was pushing all the way, but I struggled with oversteer and to be honest didn’t feel totally comfortable with the tyres.
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Another weekend that hasn’t gone Lewis Hamilton’s way. You could see that Lewis was driving very well, pushing and overtaking cars until the misunderstanding with his McLaren team-mate.
It seems that the root of the recent problems lie with the qualifying results as this is putting Lewis in a lower grid position which is putting extra pressure on him to make it back to the front to keep in touch with Vettel.
It has to be said that it didn’t exactly go Vettel’s way either who made a mistake on the last lap letting Jenson Button through to take the win.
First of all, I have to offer my heartfelt congratulations to Jenson – he drove an absolutely incredible race and thoroughly deserved this victory. It was an utterly fantastic performance, from a truly great driver.
I’m also sorry for the team; they’ve worked really hard this week and we could have done with the points that a two-car finish would have earned us today.
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It wasn’t a superb weekend for Lewis.
I think it basically was down to Qualifying 3, where Hamilton didn’t manage to show his real speed for various reasons (traffic/blocked, not enough runs, red flag etc., whatever it was down to, it wasn’t helping).
Not starting from where he should have started (most likely pole or there about) can’t be good – especially Monaco. So this situation can be frustrating.
Anyway, I think Martin made some objective comments after the race (below). Also he was saying that Lewis apologised to the race stewards afterwards about the ‘joke’ comment (this fact has most likely escaped most reporters or maybe it’s simply not dramatic enough for them to report.
Looking forward to the next race.
It’s been a disappointing weekend, really.
This afternoon, in the race itself, I made some strong moves on three drivers – Michael [Schumacher], Felipe [Massa] and Pastor [Maldonado] – and I got penalised for two of them.
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Today was another fantastic race performance by Lewis Hamilton. It was a great race to watch and it was action-packed from start to finish.
Lewis did very well to finish in 2nd position having started in 3rd and briefly dropping down to 4th after Alonso’s brief lead in the first few laps.
He hasn’t closed the points-gap to Vettel but Lewis is consistently performing very well given the various circumstances and situations thrown at him and every Lewis Hamilton fan should be very proud! McLaren are really doing a great job with the continued car development.
Very much looking forward to Monaco next weekend!
“A superb team effort”
I was pleasantly surprised by how fast we were today. In race trim, I actually think we were quicker than the Red Bulls, except through the really high-speed stuff.
I pushed as hard as I could all afternoon, and I’m really happy with the result – a few more laps and it might have been a different order at the front, but I just ran out of time at the end.
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I got a pretty decent start but made a mistake on the opening lap and lost a lot of ground out of Turn Three when I was trying to go around Webber. That was the defining moment of my afternoon: if I hadn’t dropped behind Fernando [Alonso] and Jenson, I think I could have got up to third and battled for second in the race.
The battle with Jenson was good and fair, as always, but that, and the fact that I had too much front-wing dialled into my car meant I struggled to look after the rear tyres; so my tyres were finished and that’s what kick-started the four-stop strategy.
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I’m still struggling for words – that really was one of my best races.
Before the start, I was sat in the car and thinking, “Okay, let’s go,” but the car wouldn’t start. I didn’t question what was going on, I just wanted to stay calm and not add to everyone’s stress. When I finally left the garage, I drove down the pitlane watching the light and hoped it wouldn’t turn red – and it didn’t! It’s never been that close before…
It’s rare to have battles like the ones we saw today; you really had to think about the situation, and I loved that challenge, but having to overtake people made things so much sweeter.
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Today was just one of those days. It’s never satisfying to start second and finish seventh, but that’s racing. We just have to take it on the chin and move on from it.
At the start, I was on the outside going into the first corner, I got squeezed and it was difficult to defend without risking hitting Jenson or Nick [Heidfeld]. Then, during the race, my tyres kept dropping off; we pitted earlier than was optimal, and ran out of tyres at the end. I’d hoped to make the end of the race on a set of used Primes, but they didn’t last so we had to pit right at the end of the race.
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“A GREAT RESULT – WE WERE COMPETITIVE ENOUGH TO COMPETE FOR THE WIN.”
A fantastic drive by Lewis Hamilton and a superb performance by McLaren to dramatically improve the car in a very short amount of time.
Lewis Hamilton drove a fantastic race today at Silverstone in England. His interview after the race:
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Lewis Hamilton Blog