At the Canadian GP post-race press conference, Lewis Hamilton, the seven-time F1 world champion, failed to understand the reporter’s question, in connection with Fernando Alonso's message to his race engineer on June 18, Sunday. Earlier in the race, the British driver had a brilliant outing at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, where he finished in third place, scoring two back-to-back podiums for Mercedes.
Notably, for almost the entire Canadian GP, Lewis Hamilton was involved in a thrilling battle with his arch-nemesis Fernando Alonso of Aston Martin. At the very start, he managed to get the jump on the Spanish driver off the line, but as the race moved forward, Alonso was able to move ahead of Hamilton with a quality move in the braking zone at turn 13 on the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.
But the Mercedes driver didn’t give up the fight to get within two seconds of him, going into the last few laps of the race. This situation prompted the Aston Martin race engineer to say to Alonso, “Hamilton is 1.9 seconds behind. 1.9 behind,” which led to him responding back, “Copy, leave it to me.”
Then, after the race, at the presser, the reporter jokingly asked Lewis Hamilton about the “leave it to me” message from Alonso to his race engineer, to which the British driver was perplexed and seemingly failed to understand the question.
Watch the video here:
When the reporter persisted that Hamilton would know something about the reference, he again failed to understand it and replied back, “I don’t get what the point is. He’s (Alonso) a multi-World Champion so he knows what he’s doing.”
Then, the reporter asked again, “Is this a joke?” It made the former F1 world champion sarcastically utter the words, “Ahh… I don’t get it.”
It was later revealed that the reporter’s insistence for the “leave it to me” message was directly connected to yet another former F1 world champion Kimi Raikkonen. During his days as a racing driver for Lotus at the 2012 Abu Dhabi GP, when the Finnish national was closing in on a victory, his race engineer warned him about managing the car, to which he snapped back, “Just leave me alone, I know what to do!”