Lewis Hamilton expressed his thoughts and believes he still has to do some “hunting” despite taking his seventh win of the season and the championship lead by three points.
Hamilton reigned supreme for the seventh race weekend of the year despite having to overtake Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel for the race lead due to having to do his mandatory pitstop for the soft compound. Championship rival Nico Rosberg suffering with electrical problems and ultimately retiring from the race meant the Briton also managed to overhaul the German’s 22 point advantage.
But psychologically a overhaul is not the case in Hamilton’s eyes as he admits he still feels that he’s on the backfoot and had the original aim of taking seven points off his team-mate’s lead.
“In my head, the best I thought l could do here was claiming seven points back and I’d have to keep chipping away at it. Instead, all of a sudden, it’s 25 points caught up,” reflected Hamilton, who leads the championship for only the second occasion this season.
“This is game time. This is about hunting. In my head, I don’t think I am leading the championship. There are still five races left and all I’m going to do is what I’ve done in the last two races which is just attack every session.”
The new championship leader only became aware of Rosberg’s demise when the field closed up on the formation lap and Hamilton then switched his attention towards getting to the finish, aware of Mercedes’ superior performance advantage.
“I only noticed when they [the rest of the field] caught me up at Turn One that Nico wasn’t behind and then I saw it on the screen that he was he was still on the grid,” Hamilton admitted.
“The whole approach then changed because I was thinking ‘just get the car to the end, just utilise and look after my baby’”.
Hamilton said he was concentrating on managing his own race and didn’t know that the tyre wear was increasing on his tyres so were the tyres on the Red Bulls and Alonso.
“I didn’t realise the guys behind were struggling as well. My real concern was my tyres and these tyres blowing up. I was nervous of that and I was thinking ‘these tyres are dead’,” revealed Hamilton.
“I was a bit unaware of what I needed to do on my second-last stint. I had extended for it as long as I could and then they said I needed another six seconds and my tyres were dropping off. I was also nervous that if a Safety Car came out then that would cause me big problems. But fortunately we needed to get to where I needed to go.”
As he came out of the pits after his final stop on much fresher tyres, Hamilton then felt confident of taking the fight to Vettel on-track and retaking the lead.
“I saw Sebastian going past as I came back out but straight away I knew that they were doing a two-stop and I would have good pace,”
“I took it easy on the first lap and then it was was a very tight gap so maybe I should have overtaken him somewhere else! But fortunately Sebastian was very fair and I got by. After that, it was straightforward.”
