Lewis Hamilton and team principal Fred Vasseur held clear-the-air talks after blasted their strategy in Hamilton started the race down in 12th after a difficult qualifying session.

He was able to work his way up through the field before being put onto faster medium tyres at his pit stop. But he then quickly caught up with team-mate Charles Leclerc, who was running at a slower pace on a different strategy.

Hamilton made a number of requests to be allowed past Leclerc with his frustration boiling over. including: "I'm just burning up my tyres behind him."

Despite repeating his request later, Hamilton was instructed to maintain the strategy for the benefit of DRS (Drag Reduction System) to Leclerc. But his annoyance only rose, commenting: "Man, you guys. This is not good teamwork. That's all I'm going to say."

The seven-time champion then ended the conversation with his race engineer by scarcastically saying: "Have a tea break while you're at it." Hamilton was eventually allowed past Leclerc, but ended up giving the place back when he could not progress further up the field.

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That left Hamilton finishing down in eighth, to continue his frustrating season. Vasseur, who is in his third season leading the Scuderia, has now revealed that he spoke with Hamilton after the race to defend the team's strategy calls.

“I had a discussion with Lewis, and I can perfectly understand the frustration. They are champions, they want to win races. We are asking them to let their team mate go. It's not easy," Vasseur said.

"It's never easy, and I didn't see another team do it today, but it's why we took the responsibility to do it because it's the policy for the team. We are racing for Ferrari first, and honestly, I think as a team, we did a good job.

"Again, we can argue that it would have been better to do it the lap before, but when you are in control and you have to understand if the car that’s behind is faster than the car in front just from DRS or not, it's not an easy call.

“It's always much easier to do it two hours later. We asked them to do it, they did it. The frustration when you are in the car, I can perfectly understand this. It’s not the story of the day. We'd be much more keen to speak about [why] we finished one minute beyond McLaren.”

For his part, Hamilton has insisted he will not apologise for his comments over the radio. Instead, he claimed it was a sign that he still has the 'fire in my belly' to lead Ferrari to victories.

"I lost a lot of time behind Charles and in that moment, for sure, I was like 'come on, let's make a decision quick, let's not waste time.' I'm sure people didn't like certain comments, but you've got to understand, it's frustrating," he said.

"I could have said way worse things on the radio. You hear some of the things other people have said in the past. Some of it was sarcasm. You've got to understand, we're under a huge amount of pressure in the cars.

"I was just like, 'come on, guys. I want to win'. I've still got that fire in my belly. I could feel a little bit of it really coming out there, and I'm not going to apologise for being a fighter, I'm not going to apologise for still wanting it."