Lewis Hamilton said he will apologise to Charles Leclerc following the Azerbaijan Grand Prix after he misjudged an attempt to give eighth position back to his Ferrari teammate on the final lap of the race.
The Ferrari pit wall asked Hamilton to give Leclerc the position before the end of the race after the two cars had been instructed to swap positions ten laps earlier.
Hamilton’s strategy meant he was on fresher, softer tyres in the final stint and Leclerc was asked to move aside on Lap 43 to let his teammate attack the cars ahead in the closing stages of the race.
When Hamilton was unable to make a move on Lando Norris for seventh place, he was told to let Leclerc back past on the final lap.
“You can let Charles by — he’s one and a half behind you,” Hamilton was told by his race engineer Ricardo Adami.
Adami added: “This is the last lap. Behind him is Hadjar, two seconds, Charles 1.5 behind. Let him by.”
Hamilton slowed as the cars approached the finish line but crossed 0.464 seconds ahead of Leclerc to secure eighth place.
“At the end I got the message really late on it,” Hamilton explained, “and I was like zoned in on the car in front of me, even though there was like 0.001 percent chance of passing, I was still hopeful.
“Basically, I did lift on the straight and did actually brake, but he missed it by like 0.4 seconds, so it was just a misjudgement from myself, so I’ll apologise to Charles.
“At the end of the day it’s just eighth and ninth. But it won’t happen again.”
Leclerc said the final lap had not been in line with the team’s protocol, but brushed off the incident based on the positions on offer.
“There are rules that we know we have got to work with and today maybe those rules were not respected, but I don’t … I mean, P8 and P9 or P9 and P8, that’s not something that really interests me,” he said.
“It’s more going forward that, obviously, if we are fighting for sexier positions, which I hope will be the case, I hope that we will work in a different way. But on a day like that I don’t really mind.”
After starting the race from 12th on the grid, Hamilton said there were some positives from Baku even if the final result was short of Ferrari’s expectations.
“It’s definitely not where we want to be, obviously a disappointing result at the end of the day, but I did go forwards from 12th, which was positive,” he said. “I had a good start, and I think my pace was generally good, I mean I was flat out, I was definitely much better, much happier in the car.
“It was difficult today to close up on the cars ahead, they were very fast, clearly qualifying is very important, and we missed out on that, if you look at the Williams, where they qualified [Carlos Sainz was second] and finished there [in third], so, yep.
“But there’s lots of positives to take from it, and definitely bits to draw from the weekend, which I’ll try and take into the next.”
