“I have fallen behind before and I caught up, so I will just have to do it all over again,” he said, after a non-finish at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, normally one of his favourite venues, left him 22 points behind Mercedes team-mate German Nico Rosberg.
“Naturally, for the team, I don’t want either car not to finish so hopefully we don’t have any issues on either car for the rest of the year,” added Hamilton. “That obviously means I’ll have even more work to do to make up the lost ground, probably another four wins, and I’ll do what I can to get those. We’ve good tracks coming up and the one, for me, that I make sure I win at is Silverstone.”
Hamilton was forced to retire after electrical and power problems, caused by overheating, led to a brakes failure.“I did the best I could out there and felt like I was having a strong race, but unfortunately it just wasn’t our day. There was nothing I could do about our issues.”“We were managing the loss of power, but as soon as I finally made the jump on Nico in the second pit stop, my brakes failed. There are no emotions other than I couldn’t believe my car stopped and the other didn’t, but that’s the way it goes. Two DNFs is not helpful, but there’s a long, long way to go. I’ve caught up before, so I’ll catch up again. To not finish is disappointing, but there are plenty more races ahead of us this season so let’s hope for better fortune.”
Mercedes motorsport boss Toto Wolff said: “We had at exactly the same time a failure of the engine control systems, on the ERS, on the MGU-K, with a peak in temperature which was not on our priority list. It shows you it is exactly the same power units and they were racing at exactly the same pace and had exactly the same temperatures. In that particular part of the MGU-K, we saw temperatures which were higher than expected. But we were unaware they could have such a detrimental effect and the MGU-K just shut down and we could not reset it.”
