Lewis Hamilton has apologised to his teammate for failing to hand back his position on the final lap.

With Hamilton on fresher rubber, on Lap 43 Leclerc was ordered to yield his position to his teammate in order that he could take the fight to Lando Norris, who was battling Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda for fifth.

Though he was able to close the gap to Norris, Hamilton was unable to make a move on him.

Consequently on the final lap Hamilton was ordered to hand the position back to his teammate... he failed to do so.

"Obviously, I was quicker," explained the seven-time world champion at race end, "and Charles was gracious to let me by.

"At the end, I got the message really late on, and I was zoned in on the car in front of me, even though there was 0.001 chance of passing," he added. "I was still hopeful, maybe.

"Basically, I did lift on the straight and did actually brake, but I missed it by like 4-tenths, so that was just a misjudgement from myself.

"So I apologise to Charles, but at the end of the day, it's 8th and 9th, so..."

Asked if such a situation had been previously discussed, Hamilton said: No, because there was never a thought that we would be in that position. So we didn't talk about it."

"There are rules that we know we have got to work with and today maybe those rules were not respected," said Leclerc, "but I don't... I mean, P8 and P9 or P9 and P8, that's not something that really interests me.

"It's more going forward that, obviously, if we are fighting for sexier positions, which I hope will be the case, I hope that we will work in a different way. But on a day like that I don't really mind."

Despite not finishing in a sexy position, Hamilton insists that there were positives to take away from the weekend.

"It's definitely not where we want to be, obviously a disappointing result at the end of the day, but I did go forwards from 12th, which was positive," he said. "I had a good start, and I think my pace was generally good, I mean I was flat-out, I was definitely much better, much happier in the car.

"It was difficult today to close up on the cars ahead, they were very fast," he added, "clearly qualifying is very important, and we missed out on that. If you look at the Williams, where they qualified and finished there, so, yep.

"But there's lots of positives to take from it, and definitely bits to draw from the weekend, which I'll try and take into the next."

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