Safety car hampered Vettel battle - Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton believes he would have had a close fight with Sebastian Vettel for victory in the Chinese Grand Prix but for the early Safety Car period.

Vettel pit from second place under a Virtual Safety Car in order to switch to slick tires, but saw any advantage negated by a full Safety Car within a lap of the race restart. With the leaders able to pit for slicks without major penalty, Vettel found himself fifth on the road and had to fight back to second place, by which time Hamilton had built up a 12-second lead.

Despite securing just the third grand slam of his career – pole position, fastest lap, leading every lap and the race win – Hamilton says the race with Ferrari "is so real" even if he wasn't fighting in close proximity with Vettel on track.

"It's been a fantastic weekend and very, very grateful for all the efforts that the team have put in to enable us to be where we are and where I am today," Hamilton said. "It's very overwhelming when you have a weekend like this, because I'm just a link in the chain and, when you really think about it, there's thousands of people involved, hundreds and hundreds of people involved in me being up here and us being where we are.

"So, congratulations to all of them. I hope they're all celebrating back home. I hope they're feeling the spirit, I hope they're feeling the fight... because it's on.

"With the race... qualifying was great, to be able to pull that good lap out, it put me in a great position. Start was fantastic; I'm so happy with the way starts are going to I need to keep that up! And then in the race, really just keeping my composure. Some really tricky conditions out there, particularly on the intermediate. Then, after that, once we'd done the pit stop with the Safety Car, the speed was very low and being very cold, our temperatures in our tires, they're like... they're just not working, they're so cold. So it was very, very easy to make mistakes and I'm just grateful I didn't.

"And then at the end, the last 20-odd laps we were just pounding around as fast as we can, exchanging lap times, and I think that's what racing is all about. Perhaps in the future there will be times when we won't have a Safety Car and their won't be that six seconds gap, it'll be right on the tail either way. Excited for that."

And Hamilton acknowledged there were times in the race when he didn't have the ability to respond to Vettel's pace once the Ferrari moved up to second.

"It is, as I said, very, very close and there were times when Sebastian put laps in and it was hard to even match the time. The last ten or 12 laps he was doing a 35.6 and I was doing a 35.8 and it was very hard to get to where he was. Then there was other times in the race when I was quicker."