Hamilton rues lack of pace on ‘dull day’ at Monza while Russell reflects on ‘strange’ changes in pecking order

It was a disappointing day for Mercedes at the Italian Grand Prix, with Lewis Hamilton admitting that he struggled to make progress from a lonely fifth place while George Russell was left to rue the impact of a difficult start, having eventually crossed the line in P7.

After being critical of his own qualifying performance on Saturday – a day on which he felt he could have taken pole position – Hamilton tried to make amends on Sunday from P6 on the grid. Ultimately, though, the seven-time world champion could not match the pace of the Ferrari and McLaren cars ahead.

Reflecting on his afternoon at Monza, Hamilton commented: “It was a really dull, dull day. I was hoping to have more pace and be able to progress, but I couldn’t even… I mean, I was I think as quick for a while with Carlos [Sainz] but then I had more deg[radation], maybe as I was right behind, not sure.

“Yeah, just today for some reason we didn’t have the pace.”

Asked if he had found a good place on Sunday to understand what had gone wrong on qualifying day, Hamilton explained: “Yeah, in terms of understanding yesterday, I definitely need to go away and try to figure it out, but I’ve been trying to figure it out for ages anyways.

“But I was… I could have had pole right until the last corner, but either way we didn’t have the race pace even if I had miracle-y pulled out the pole lap.

“Still, just would have been nice to start higher and maybe today [that] would have meant we could have finished third or fourth or something like that. But ultimately we didn’t have the pace of the cars ahead.”

Russell, meanwhile, had started further up the order in P3 but slipped backwards after locking up into the first corner as he tried to avoid the McLaren of Oscar Piastri. This forced the Briton to go down the escape road, as well as resulting in him picking up damage to his front wing endplate.

From there he went on to finish the race in seventh place and, when quizzed later on whether the opening few hundred metres had defined his Grand Prix, Russell conceded: “Yeah, they really did. I made a good start alongside Oscar.

“He had the slipstream from Lando [Norris] and when he pulled out in front of me and hit the brakes I misjudged it, hit the brakes my side and I was locking up the rear tyres and was about to crash into him, so had to take avoiding action and that’s where it all went wrong.

“[I’m] really quite disappointed, because so much hard work goes into all these weekends for it to go away so quick. But, ultimately, I don’t think we would have had the pace to fight with Ferrari and McLaren.”

Assessing the overriding emotions from Mercedes’ weekend at Monza, Russell stated that the team need to make steps forward in order to match their rivals, with the pecking order having continued to evolve across recent races.

“I think it is very tight at the moment, especially in qualifying, but McLaren and Ferrari definitely seem to have the edge on us at the moment,” the 26-year-old said.

“And it’s all a bit strange, like when you look at Red Bull’s performance, nobody would have predicted that five races ago. So either those guys have made big gains or I don’t know what’s going on, but we need to keep working hard and make some changes.”