Lewis Hamilton 'feels blame' for Baku dropped points

Mercedes

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Hamilton 'feels blame' for Baku dropped points

Hamilton fell to the back of the pack after a rare error in Azerbaijan

Sam Hall

Thursday 10 June 2021 08:00

Mercedes technology director Mike Elliott revealed Lewis Hamilton "feels a chunk of blame" for the error that dropped him out of the points in Azerbaijan.

Hamilton endured a tough weekend in Baku as he initially ended Friday practice outside the top 10 before recovering to qualify second.

After a strong performance throughout the race, Hamilton was promoted to second when Red Bull title rival Max Verstappen crashed and caused the race to be red-flagged.

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But at the restart, Hamilton "clipped" the 'brake magic' switch and pushed the brake bias forwards, a mistake that ultimately ended the seven-time champion's 54-race points streak.

Assessing what unfolded and Hamilton’s mindset, Elliott said: "I know speaking to Lewis that Lewis sort of feels a chunk of blame for that.

“But the reality is Lewis makes so few mistakes and that’s what really sets him apart from some of the other drivers.

"It’s our duty to try and give him a car where it’s more difficult for him to make mistakes. We need to take our share of that, look at how we can improve that and that’s something we will put in place for the next race.”

Mercedes still feels the pain

In the immediate aftermath of the race, team principal Toto Wolff explained the "anger" and "pain" he felt after recording a first zero score with both cars finishing since 2012.

That pain, revealed Elliott, is still being felt by the team.

He added: "I think as you can expect we all sort of feel a bit of pain from this weekend and that’s normal and that’s something we won’t really get over until we get a chance to put that right, which will hopefully be at the next race in France.

"W you are in sport, you realise that you have weekends like this and what’s really important is how we bounce back from that.

"How do we take the pain from that, turn that into positive energy for learning, work out how we extract all the learning that we can from that, turn that into future performance and that’s what we’ll really be concentrating on.”