Hamilton won, cutting Vettel’s championship lead to seven points, but revealed Ferrari’s display has left him with a cautious mindset about the remaining races of the season. The Englishman thinks the battle will ebb and flow between both drivers until November’s title decider in Abu Dhabi.
“I can’t predict it, but just from what we have experienced up until now and how close we were [at Spa], for sure it’s how it’s going to be and it’s going right down to the wire,” Hamilton said. “I am sure he was hoping I was going to make mistakes, but that was not happening. I think that’s what it can come down to, reliability, it can come down to the pendulum shifting a millimetre in performance either way and it’s down to us, and consistency.”
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff thinks viewing the remainder of the season in such terms is wrong.
“I think first of all it’s difficult to attribute patterns of circuits to specific cars. We’ve seen this year, you think you’re good and then you’re not as good. What we’ve seen is that we weren’t great on the high-downforce, slow races such as Hungary and Monaco.
“We need to improve that for Singapore. It’s a tough fight with Ferrari. Everyone is extracting the maximum to win this development race. We need to bring performance to the car every race in order to get our nose in front. In so far, not surprised.”