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Another bad day for ‘fragile’ Lewis Hamilton

Nico Rosberg takes increasingly strong grip on this year’s title in Japan

Winner Nico Rosberg (left) and third-placed Lewis Hamilton after the Japanese Grand Prix. Photograph: EPA/Diego Azubel
Winner Nico Rosberg (left) and third-placed Lewis Hamilton after the Japanese Grand Prix. Photograph: EPA/Diego Azubel
Paul Weaver at Suzuka
Sun Oct 09 2016 - 23:00

The lost weekend of Lewis Hamilton is likely to result in an epic hangover. A Japanese Grand Prix he really had to win to stand a realistic chance of retaining his Formula One world championship was lost as his team-mate Nico Rosberg took an increasingly strong grip on this year's title.

However, after two shattering defeats for the British driver in the space of eight days, the investigation that Mercedes will hold to discover what went wrong for Hamilton in Suzuka is likely to be careful with his sensibilities.

The Mercedes head of motorsport, Toto Wolff, hinted as much when he said yesterday evening: "I am on the same flight [home]. I think just after such a race it is not the right moment to really put the finger where it hurts.

“We need to calm down and find out what happened, regroup, and my learning from the last couple of years is that 24 hours later things look different.”

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Besides, Wolff was hardly in a postmortem mood after seeing his team nail their third constructors’ title in three years.

Embarrassment

However, Hamilton has caused Mercedes much embarrassment recently. After the Malaysian Grand Prix, where his engine blew 15 laps from the end of a race he was dominating, he gave ammunition to conspiracy theorists on social media when he said that someone did not want him to win the tile.

Then in Suzuka press conferences on Thursday and Saturday there were signs of a mental fragility not seen since his meltdown year of 2011.

And again yesterday evening there was more controversy when he appeared to go against an appeal decision made by his team.

For the fifth time this season Hamilton made a wretched getaway, immediately dropping from his second place on the grid to eighth. That followed other awful starts in Australia, Bahrain, Canada and Italy.

Rosberg, it seems, has no trouble with the extra demands on clutch control that are being made this season. Indeed he just cannot stop winning. This was his ninth victory of the season (while Hamilton has six). There was a growing sense in Japan that Rosberg deserves the world title this year. Guardian Service