The rivalry between Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton for the Formula One title is turning into a full-blown scrap, both on and off the track.
Germany’s Rosberg won the Monaco Grand Prix from pole position on Sunday to take the championship lead back from Hamilton, who claimed the previous four races.
Sunday’s win was a fifth straight 1-2 finish for Mercedes, who have swept all six races this season, but that seems to be the only type of harmony in the team, with Hamilton appearing unhappy before, during and after the Monaco GP.
Photo: Reuters
“It’s a fierce battle between me and Nico, and will continue that way,” the Briton said.
Rosberg drew his teammate’s ire during qualifying the day before Sunday’s race when a late error led to a yellow flag that ended Hamilton’s chances of beating the German’s time with a final flying lap.
Rosberg denied causing the incident intentionally and was cleared of any wrongdoing by race stewards. He went on to clinch his second victory of the season and fifth of his career, repeating his maiden GP win from pole in Monaco last year.
He leads Hamilton by four points in the drivers’ standings, 122-118.
Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso, who came fourth in Monaco, is already 57 points behind Hamilton.
“It’s a special win, definitely, because Lewis has had the momentum with results,” Rosberg said.
The German finished 9.2 seconds ahead of Hamilton, who was 0.4 seconds faster than Daniel Ricciardo’s Red Bull. Four-time defending champion Sebastian Vettel’s frustrating season with Red Bull continued as he abandoned the race on lap eight with a power unit failure.
Hamilton and Rosberg raced each other in their junior karting days, but did not seem to have shaken hands after the race and the Briton looked visibly tense in the post-match race conference as he sat next to his teammate.
Hamilton revealed that he and Rosberg had not been in the post-qualifying debriefing together on Saturday, saying: “Nico did his big debrief before I got there, which is not what we normally do. Fortunately the engineers wrote down what Nico said.”
At the drivers’ pre-race parade, they were at opposite ends of the circuit and have six months left together until the end of the season.
During the race, Hamilton snapped back at his team when told that Ricciardo was closing on him, telling them: “I don’t care about Ricciardo, what’s the gap to Nico?”
Hamilton would certainly have attacked more on another track, but overtaking on Monaco’s tight and narrow 78-lap circuit — which has F1’s slowest average speed — is so tough that 10 of the past 11 winners there came from pole. The exception was Hamilton in 2008, the year he won the title.
The British driver on Thursday sparked the escalation in his rivalry with Rosberg when he compared his childhood with that of his teammate, whose father is former F1 driver Keke Rosberg.
“I come from a not-great place in Stevenage and lived on a couch in my dad’s apartment, and Nico grew up in Monaco with jets and hotels and boats,” Hamilton said. “If I were to come here believing that Nico is hungrier than me then I might as well go home.”
Hamilton later explained what he meant by “hungrier,” saying: “I said what gives me the hunger is where I grew up, in comparison to where Nico grew up. I was striving to come to live [in Monaco]. I used to travel around with Nico on his dad’s plane, I used to go on his boat, [in] his house. That gave me the desire to want that.”
Adding more drama to the Monaco race was the failure of eight drivers to finish the course.
The safety car came out on lap one after Mexico’s Sergio Perez was bumped off the track by former teammate Jenson Button’s McLaren at the Mirabeau turn and again on lap 26 when German Adrian Sutil’s Sauber went into the barriers on the run down to the chicane.
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