Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMercedes

Hamilton: Ferrari win 'blown out of proportion'

Lewis Hamilton says he wants to race Ferrari closely in the Chinese Grand Prix, but believes its win in Malaysia has been "blown out of proportion".

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff described Sebastian Vettel's victory as a "wake-up call" for the defending champions, with Nico Rosberg also saying he was surprised by Ferrari's pace. However, when Hamilton was asked if he agrees with Wolff's analysis, he says he is much more relaxed about Ferrari's challenge.

"I honestly don't [agree], but he is the team boss and you would imagine that is his perspective," Hamilton said. "For me, you can't get every weekend right, and it wasn't even that much of a disaster of a weekend for us. Apart from the fact we missed a session, but that could happen any time.

"We missed a session, we had no real time to do a set-up and didn't do a long run, so we would have changed things on set-up. As a car wasn't on track maybe we could have worked harder to extract more from Nico's car, so there are so many things we could have done better, but it wasn't a big disaster.

"People have definitely blown it out of proportion, and hopefully we will get it right this weekend."

Asked if he prefers having Ferrari in the fight for victory, Hamilton replied: "Absolutely.

"I was actually quite chilled after the race because you can't win them all. Second is still good. It was great to have that competition. I wish we were closer and we didn't have the 10-second gap between us because it could have been a really good race, so hopefully we'll have that here. That would be really cool."

Click here for Chris Medland's Chinese Grand Prix preview.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.