"You guys have been begging for racing for ages and you got it. You just have to make up your mind, and chill. Racing is racing."
Wednesday 3 July 2019 11:11, UK
Lewis Hamilton was disappointed not to have been in the "fight" at the Austrian GP but believes an enthralling race was just what Formula 1 needed.
Hamilton finished fifth on Sunday as cooling issues in his Mercedes - along with a broken front wing and lengthy pit-stop - limited the five-time world champion, who has seen his title lead cut down to 31 points.
But while Hamilton, who was overtaken by Sebastian Vettel in the closing stages, was not able to battle Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc, he was happy there was "racing" and claimed media and fans have been too reactive when criticising the sport's spectacle.
"You guys have been begging for racing for ages and you got it," Hamilton told reporters in Spielberg. "Ultimately, I guess what [Austria] shows is that you can't look at just one weekend and complain because that is what seems to happen.
"One weekend doesn't go so well and then everyone is like, 'oh racing is boring'. Then you have a race like this and it's exciting, then the next race it's boring again.
"You just have to make up your mind, and chill. Racing is racing."
Mercedes, whose perfect F1 2019 streak was ended, were struggling to cool down their engine in the Austrian heat and altitude, but Hamilton felt he could have challenged for a fifth consecutive victory without those problems.
"It's a difficult formula today," he said. "It's very technical and if we didn't have our engine temperature issue today we would have been in that fight. We had the tyres to do it, we had the pace to do it, we would have been there.
"But unfortunately the way that these cars are, we were unfortunately in the wrong place today. We couldn't get close to anyone."
But Hamilton insisted Mercedes had not got "complacent" on their winning run, and is confident Austria will be a one-off dip for the runaway leaders.
"I don't think we needed a weekend like this to remind us... we've not been complacent," he added. "We knew it was going to be difficult, we knew it would be a difficult weekend for us and it was probably more difficult than we thought.
"But we were not being complacent at all, the guys work very, very hard. It was just one of those days."
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