The Italian Grand Prix proved a bitter pill to swallow for Scuderia Ferrari, as the team leaves Monza with a meagre two points courtesy of Kimi Raikkonen’s ninth place. Fernando Alonso failed to finish, after a technical problem saw him retire at the start of lap 29.
At the start, the two Maranello team drivers were unable to make up any places and after the only pit stop they dropped a few. When he retired, Fernando was lying tenth, the position that Kimi then took over. The Finn had a difficult start but fought back in the second part of a race that featured plenty of battles. The Finn crossed the line in tenth, but was promoted to ninth, as McLaren’s Kevin Magnussen had to add a 5 second penalty to his race time.
Lewis Hamilton took his sixth win of the season, the 28th of his career, crossing the line ahead of Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg. The German thus maintains the lead in the championship, while Felipe Massa was third for Williams. The next round is in Singapore in a fortnight’s time.
Fernando Alonso
“After a long run of trouble-free races, it’s a real shame I had to retire just here in Monza, in front of all our fans. I would have liked to have put on a very different race for them. In the first stint we were competitive, but when you find yourself in a group of cars where everyone is using DRS, overtaking becomes nearly impossible. After the pit stop, I found myself at the back of a train of cars and at that point we changed the strategy, deciding to drop back from the group to conserve the tyres and try and attack at the end of the race. But then came the problem with the ERS system. It’s never nice for the team to have a reliability problem, because the guys work night and day to give us the best car possible. What happened doesn’t change my will to win and in order to try and have that happen soon, we will continue to work as hard as we can, always giving our all.”
Kimi Raikkonen
“We knew this would be a difficult weekend and today in the race, we saw the proof of that. Overall, I was happy with the handling of the car and the balance was good, but we lacked speed down the straight and I didn’t have much grip. As soon as I got close to the cars ahead of me, I lost aerodynamic downforce and the car was sliding all over the place. I think I did the most I could today, even if unfortunately I was unable to get the result I would have wanted for our home race, for the team and all our fans. Now we must think of the upcoming races and continue to work nonstop, because we are coming up to tracks that should better suit the characteristics of our car.”