76 points — that is the historic gulf that has opened up between Lewis Hamilton and the championship leader after Monza. Starting from fourth, the Briton crossed the line sixth. The cause was a first-lap collision, when his team-mate Charles Leclerc ran him off the circuit and onto the grass. That single episode dropped Hamilton to tenth.
On lap two the situation grew worse still. Leclerc felt a problem with his throttle pedal, lost control of the car and hit the barrier at high speed, and the Monegasque's race was over. The chaos on track turned Ferrari's home celebration in Italy into an outright collapse. Relations between the two team-mates have been left severely strained by the incident, and Hamilton was blunt about what happened. "I was ahead in turn two by the ethics, I was ahead. There was no 'we' in it," he insisted. Although the Briton leads Leclerc by 36 points in the standings, he sees no value now in Ferrari handing him priority. "It's far too late for those decisions to come," the champion stated flatly. Between the internal feud and the technical failure, the Italian team surrendered crucial ground to championship leaders Mercedes.
