Wolff: Nobody to blame for Hamilton's bad start at Monza

Mercedes chief Toto Wolff has refused to point a finger of blame for Lewis Hamilton's sloppy get away from the line at the start of Italian Grand Prix and is adamant that his team to not apportion blame in such instances.

"The reason we changed the rules last year was to give more responsbility to the driver and make it more variable. But its just what happens, you have good starts and bad starts, and I think our system has improved a lot. But obviously [at Monza] machine and driver got it wrong."

"What we can see is that it is a procedural thing so I don't want to blame anybody. Neither Lewis, nor the engineers, nor the systems. I think we have to properly address that topic because it cost him a race and I think we all need to stick the heads together to avoid that for him and the team."

Pressed by media to lay blame somewhere, Wolff responded, "We are never blaming anybody. This team, I would never believe anyone is to blame, not the driver, not the engineer, nobody."

"When you start to blame this is when it goes downhill because people will try to protect their arse and make sure they have a conservative system in place rather than putting the best development on the car."

"Nobody is to blame. In this particular case I think it's a combination of many things, partly because we changed rules last year and why I don't want to go there," added Wolff.

A mere 24 hours after posting one of his greatest qualifying laps to claim pole position at Monza, Hamilton fumbled the start and before he knew it was looking at the back end of six cars, but it appears he was not caught napping when the red lights went out at Monza.

"I'm told it wasn't a driver error, but it wasn't anyone's error," Hamilton explained afterwards. "You've seen it with Nico in Hockenheim and it's bitten me quite a lot this year. I was told the procedure was just as I was supposed to do it but unfortunately we had an over-delivery of torque and the wheels were just spinning from the get-go."

"Of course, we never stop improving and learning. Today we would have learnt again but this year has been a harder year for us with the clutch. It's not a quick fix, not something we can change for the next race. We have made improvements and have made more consistent starts but we are still caught out by the random variation that we have from one weekend to another."

"We do practice starts all weekend and they are varying a little bit and then, every now and then, we get a random variation on the grid. You've seen it with Nico and you've seen it with me, quite a few times, so we will continue to work on it."

"I assure you that on Tuesday [after the race] that's all we will be talking about because everything else we are doing really well. I will be trying to give as much information to help the last seven races. We are not struggling with pole positions, it's just getting off the line."