Austrian Grand Prix was “the worst race” that Hamilton could remember for “a very, very long time.”
Hamilton lead the race from the pole position and was in the lead when he ran into issues. Both Mercedes cars retired due to loss of fuel pressure.
Ferrari’s driver Sebastian Vettel, who is title rival to Hamilton, reclaimed his title lead by a point which he had lost in last race.
Hamilton said, “We can’t throw away points. It’s not a great feeling.”
Hamilton was cruising through the race when a failed strategy of the team costed him lead. The team failed to cash safety car period and had to pit later which made Hamilton vulnerable.
Chief strategist of Mercedes, James Vowles, admitted his fault over the radio, when Hamilton expressed his anger over team throwing away points.
But rather than strategy failure, Hamilton was forced for another pit stop due to tyre problems. Then fuel pressure pushed Hamilton to retire eight laps earlier with no points.
His team, Valterri Bottas, was also forced to retire after 13 laps with loss of hydraulic pressure.
Hamilton said: “An unfortunate day. Everyone is going to be feeling the pain. We have had such great reliability for so many years and as painful as it is, we have to take the rough with the smooth. But I have every confidence in my team that we will be able to bounce back.”
“All areas we are going to have to work on. The car has been great all weekend and then to have two different faults on both cars is very unusual.
“We have to find a bullet-proof method to move forward with strategy.”
He added: “I don’t really understand. We have a lot of strategists, and how we can make these kinds of errors… but James put his hand up and said it was his call.
“We will try and analyse and figure out how we can improve. We have lost a lot of points this year through bad calls and reliability.”
Hamilton admired Vowel for being “brutally honest with himself and everyone.”
He added, “We could all have done a better job this weekend. It is very rare we have these DNFs, and incredibly unusual to have two on one weekend. It’s a real shame because we had great car and we were looking very strong but we will live to fight another day.”
