Lewis Hamilton has claimed his team-mate Nico Rosberg came clean about the incident at the start of the Belgian Grand Prix.
Hamilton passed pole-sitter Rosberg off the line despite having to reverse his car into his grid box before the start. Having fended off an attack from Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel on the opening lap, Rosberg took advantage of Vettel running wide and mounted an attack of his own on the Briton down to the Les Combes chicane and the pair came together.
The contact left Hamilton with a left-rear puncture and doing a lengthy tour of the 7km Spa-Francorchamps track as he trudged back to the pits, retiring towards the end of the race having battled with car damage afterwards while Rosberg was beaten to the race win by Daniel Ricciardo on strategy after losing time in his first pit-stop changing his front-wing damaged from the contact made with Hamilton.
In late post-race interviews, Hamilton revealed that Rosberg in the team’s debrief admitted making contact with him deliberately in order to “prove a point”.
“We just had a meeting about it and he basically said he did it on purpose,” said Hamilton, who now finds himself 29 points behind championship leader Rosberg, the gap being the biggest this season so far.
“He said he could have avoided it. He said ‘I did it to prove a point’. He basically said I did it to prove a point.
“And you don’t have to just rely on me. Go and ask Toto [Wolff] and Paddy [Lowe] who are not happy with him as well.”
The 2008 world champion believed there was no wrong on his part, insisting he had the high ground coming into the chicane and was surprised by what was said by Rosberg in the debrief.
“You know, and you can ask Fernando [Alonso] and you can ask all drivers, when a car is less than half a car length alongside you and you are on the inside, it’s your racing line,” he told reporters.
“It’s not your job to go massively out of your way to leave extra, extra room. And it wasn’t one of those corners where there’s a wall there or anything.
“Look at Sebastian [Vettel]. He was actually further up [in a lap one move] and he knew he wasn’t going to go out the other side. He was sensible about it.”
“I took the inside line and had the corner, we braked very deep into the corner because if I’d braked early he would have come down the outside, which would have meant he was alongside me through that section.
“But we went in very deep but I still made the corner as the same normal line that I would do normally. And then he was in my blind spot. But I can see quite far behind me and I knew he was behind so when I continued my line.”
Mercedes Motorsport boss Toto Wolff however has come out and denied any deliberation from the German in the incident, implying that it was a case of misintepretation.
“Nico felt he needed to hold his line [in the corner],” Wolff said. “He needed to make a point, and for Lewis, it was clearly not him who needed to be aware of Nico. He [Rosberg] didn’t give in. He thought it was for Lewis to leave him space, and that Lewis didn’t leave him space.
“So they agreed to disagree in a very heated discussion amongst ourselves, but it wasn’t deliberately crashing. That is nonsense. It was deliberately taking into account that if Lewis moves or would open then it could end up in a crash.
“What we saw there was that Nico was not prepared to take the exit, and that caused the collision. That is not something we want to happen.”
