Hamilton unhappy with conflicting rulings on 'defensive moves'

Lewis Hamilton underlined the uneven way in which drivers are treated when making two defensive moves in a race, such as Sebastian Vettel did in Russia according to the Brit.

At Sochi, Vettel had successfully undercut Hamilton during the pitstop rotation but the German driver was hounded by the Mercedes driver immediately after rejoining the race.

Hamilton eventually got the upper hand over Vettel despite a defensive maneuver by the Ferrari driver at Turn 2 that nearly led to a collision between the two drivers, at least in Hamilton's view.

He radioed in to his team to signal that Vettel had undertaking "two moves", but the Russian Grand Prix stewards ultimately saw nothing wrong with Vettel's maneuver, a decision that surprised Hamilton.

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"The same rules are not always applied to the same things," said the current leader of the world championship, speaking in Suzuka ahead of this weekend's Japanese Grand Prix.

"As far as I am aware, when I drive down the straight I’m not allowed to move twice - but there are drivers that do move twice and nothing happens to them.

"Maybe there are some drivers that moved twice and then something does happen to them. I was really surprised when I watched the replay because it was a clear two moves.

"But when you are doing 200mph things happen so fast. I thought we were going to crash. I thought at that moment the win might be going and I might be going up in the air.

"I was really surprised that when I pulled out of it I managed to keep the car in one piece and we made it to the second corner and it actually ended up being awesome racing."

Hamilton put in an extra effort to quickly overhaul his rival fair and square but denied his determination had been fueled by any anger associated with Vettel's antics.

"Honestly I don’t hold anger in the car," he insisted;

"I mean that’s not true, when I came out third I was relatively peeved off that I’d done all of this work and somehow the strategy didn’t go right and I was definitely frustrated at that.

"So if anything it was that anger that propelled me to want to get back past," he added.

"Being in third I knew that I’d be losing several points to Sebastian, which through my driving wasn’t supposed to happen so I was very eager to get by.

"It didn’t happen that time so I did it next time but that manoeuvre he did didn’t make me more aggressive to then fight the next corner."

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