AUSTIN, Texas -- Lewis Hamilton said his team's performance at the U.S. Grand Prix was a long way off its usual standard after he started on pole position and finished third.
Hamilton lost a position at the start of the race to eventual winner Kimi Raikkonen, resulting in Mercedes trying to salvage the situation by adopting a two-stop strategy. The first stop came under a Virtual Safety Car and offered Hamilton the chance to take on new tyres while his rivals were circulating at a slower pace, but he still needed to make a second stop and ultimately that dropped him to third.
"I didn't really have any problems," he said after the race. "I just think collectively as a team we didn't perform that great today and that is not something we usually do.
"We will go back to the drawing board and we will regroup and make sure that next week we are okay. We have had some incredible performances this year and been really good with consistency but this was a long way from par for us this weekend."
Hamilton needed to outscore Sebastian Vettel by eight points to win the title in Austin, but by the end of the race he only had a three-point advantage over his title rival. The championship will now continue to the next round in Mexico where he needs just five points to ensure he is crowned champion.
Asked if Mercedes was too conservative with strategy in Austin in the hope that he would get the result he needed for the title on Sunday, Hamilton said: "There was that feeling with the performance and the decisions that were taken today, as opposed to previous races, but I didn't think we needed to make many changes [to our approach]. I don't know why they wouldn't want to win the race, I think they did want to win the race but it just didn't play out the way that we planned."
Hamilton said the strategy mistakes started on Saturday when Mercedes opted to start the race on the super-soft tyre rather than the ultra-soft by using the red-striped compound in the second stage of qualifying. Raikkonen and Ferrari chose to start on the faster but less durable ultra-soft tyre and Hamilton believes that gave the Ferrari driver the edge at the start.
"I think it started from Q2, the tyre was the wrong tyre to start on and we'd already seen a long time ago this year that Kimi starting on the softer tyre, I think it was in Austria, that there was a big difference on the start performance between the different tyres, yet we went the same way as before and lost a position," he said. "Then I wasn't able to keep up as he had clean air and a better tyre.
"It was definitely an issue for us and we'll look through it as performance-wise it wasn't a great weekend. We've had some incredible races this year and we're still grateful for that but naturally we started first here and we wanted to finish first."