Hamilton plays down Vettel’s crash with Bottas

A lot has been said about the Vettel-Bottas crash at the French GP, with Mercedes terming the 5 second penalty to be a little too lenient.

And while Hamilton too criticised the extent of the penalty he also went onto to term it as a ‘racing incident’.

In his post race press conference a lot of the focus was given on Hamilton’s comments about the stewards being too lenient, and a big part of his statement largely went missing.

Hamilton conceded that the coming together of Bottas and Vettel was a racing incident and not one where Sebastian had lost control of his car under pressure.

He wanted the journalists to know that the drivers were putting their lives on the line with this profession, going for any and every space that they could find.

“It is really a racing incident and those things can happen. We’re all going into that first corner at great speeds. We’re all on the edge, we’re fighting for world championships, we’re not pootling around, we’re out there putting our lives on the line, we’re out there putting the cars as far beyond the edge as we can in the safest manner. It’s not like a train track, you don’t just stay on the rails. Sometimes you can go off. We’re only human.” Hamilton said.

For Austria, Hamilton is absolutely confident that qualification will largely determine who finishes where as overtaking is extremely difficult in Spielberg, despite of those long straights.

“At [Speilberg] you can’t really overtake, even though you’ve got those long straights. You can’t follow through turn one. It’s going to be about who qualifies where.” Hamilton said.