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 "We just had another crappy start, which was the root cause of all
the other stuff that came afterwards," Mercedes motorsport head Toto
Wolff said in a frank assessment of Sunday's debacle.
Mercedes have started all 10 races this season on pole position, and
have won eight of them, but for the first time this year they had no
drivers on the podium.
The Ferraris of Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen scythed past
Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg when the start lights went out, just
as Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas had at Silverstone for Williams.
Mercedes were left on the back foot in Hungary, triggering a chain
reaction that left world champion Hamilton -- who also had a poor
start in Austria -- finishing sixth and Rosberg eighth while Vettel
went on to win.
"We need to get on top of the situation. It is not acceptable and it
needs to be analyzed why it happened," said Wolff. "It is many
various reasons, not one particular one."
Wolff said he thought a clutch calibration problem was to blame,
with the cars suffering too much wheelspin.
The next race is Belgium and, to complicate matters, there will be
restrictions on the amount of information teams can give drivers at
the start and that could shake things up.
Ferrari technical head James Allison agreed that the opening seconds
had been crucial on Sunday.
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"If you get away well at the start and are in free air, and you can
have your race without compromise, it makes a lot of difference," he
said.
It certainly did for Hamilton, who could only laugh ultimately at
the string of blunders he made.
The Briton banged wheels with Rosberg, bumped across the gravel,
collided with Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo and collected a
drive-through penalty.
"I don't remember a day like this," he said, thankful at least to
have stretched his lead over Rosberg to 21 points despite the
mayhem.
"I just have to laugh at today, laugh at myself. When you make wrong
decisions or make a fool of yourself sometimes, you just have to
laugh it off.
"Considering how bad it was, the one thing I can take in my heart is
I never gave up. I never threw my toys out of the pram and thought
'this is over'."
(Editing by Amlan Chakraborty)
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