Lewis Hamilton had a pretty smooth race on Sunday, barring just one issue as he came home to finish P4. The 7-time world champion was not happy with the team after he got caught out by the safety car.

All this began when Hamilton pitted before the safety car while his teammate George Russell pitted during the safety car. This gave Russell an advantage in terms of track position and held on to his position ahead of Hamilton.

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But the 7-time world champion closed in the final part of the race, yet he could not really challenge George.

Lewis Hamilton explains the reason behind his frustrations

Lewis came on the radio and mentioned that the team put him in a difficult spot. It was quite surprising to see Hamilton put blame on Mercedes, as he is very appreciative of them on most occasions. He backed off from challenging Russell and finished around two seconds behind him.

“I couldn’t fight for 3rd because the engine was overheating, so I had to back off and sit behind. But, we bagged as many points as we could as a team and that was great,” said Lewis.

“In this weekend we’ve had so many difficult moments with the car. To get ourselves fifth and sixth in qualifying, to have progressed like we have, and to have reliability, we definitely didn’t expect to have a third and fourth.”

“George did a great job today. I got to see some of the battle with him racing Perez and I wish I could have been in it,” the Mercedes driver concluded.

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It is certainly nice to see Hamilton scoring such consistent points at the start of this season. But it is quite clear the Mercedes team is not quite challenging Red Bull and Ferrari despite finishing higher in the races. The team would hope that going into the European leg of the season, they would find some performance in the W13.

Hopefully, Mercedes will bring some upgrades to the next race in Imola and be a little closer to the frontrunners. Let’s see who comes out on top from the Mercedes driver lineup at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.