Hamilton slid straight on and nosed into the barrier while chasing Carlos Sainz shortly after half distance.
He was able to get going again, but his front wing was damaged, and he was forced to come in and change it.
He was able to combine the stop with a switch to slicks, but the whole episode cost him a lot of time, and dropped him from fourth to ninth place.
He eventually finished the race in the same position.
“I knew it was all over from then,” said Hamilton when asked by Motorsport.com about the error. “But these things happen. I mean, I’m not going to punish myself for a mistake.
“I think it was very tricky conditions I would say for everyone, and I think our car, whatever the problems that we have with this car, it’s magnified in the rain when it’s wet. A very, very hard car to drive in the rain.”
Asked if like Max Verstappen he lost control when the car bottomed out, he said: “I don’t really know. I will check on the data.
“I don’t want to blame it on that, but the car was bottoming a lot, and obviously had the locking. So I don’t know where the locking came from.”
Hamilton initially thought he’d got away without wing damage.
The Mercedes pit crew replace a front wing on the car of Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W13
Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images
“For the first few corners it felt normal, and then eventually sparks started to show, and I think then it just failed.”
Hamilton’s race started to go awry at the start, when he lost out to Sainz at the first corner. He said on the radio that he’d been pushed wide, but insisted that he wasn’t trying to get the Spaniard penalised.
“It’s fine,” he said. “Racing. The only reason I mentioned it is because I didn’t want anyone to think I just drove off track, because there’s a bollard to the far right, but I was actually forced wide, so that was the only reason.”
The move by Sainz meant that Hamilton was stuck behind the Ferrari driver, and he was left frustrated as he lost contact with leaders Sergio Perez and Charles Leclerc.
“Yeah, that kind of difficult start, and then obviously getting stuck behind Carlos. I don’t know why he was so slow. But obviously not quick enough to get past him in these conditions, and then just sitting behind him.
“But I think I could do similar times to the guys ahead, but because I was stuck behind him, I couldn’t. I think if I was third I would have would have kept with the guys up ahead.”
Hamilton also explained a message to the team early in…
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