Monza showed how far Ferrari has fallen

Ferrari drivers Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen seemed pretty pleased to finish a distant third and fourth in the Italian Grand Prix, which is surprising given the events of this Monza weekend showcased starkly just how far Mercedes' rivals still have to travel before they can make a real race of Formula 1 again.

Carrying the fight to Mercedes was the great expectation within the corridors of Maranello for this season, but things haven't panned out as hoped.

The Scuderia took a radical approach with conception of the SF16-H, but the car has not been as reliable as hoped, it's not been as fast as hoped, and it has not developed as well as hoped either.

After 14 races last season Ferrari had won three grands prix, scored 12 podiums, 337 points (trailing Mercedes by 169), and was positioned a clear second in the constructors' championship.

This season it has failed to win a race, finished on the podium fewer times, scored fewer points than at the same stage last season, and has been leapfrogged in the championship by Red Bull.

Ferrari has restructured its technical team in the middle of the year (never a good sign), and now trails Mercedes by a bigger points margin than at the equivalent stage last year.

No wonder company president Sergio Marchionne declared ahead of his team's home race that Ferrari had failed to hit its targets for 2016.

Alongside difficulties unlocking performance from the chassis, engine development has also not kept pace with Mercedes in the same way this year.

Last season Ferrari pushed Mercedes relatively hard in this area. Mercedes introduced an engine upgrade at Monza 12 months ago, and when Nico Rosberg's new power unit developed a fault during practice he had to fit an old one and was pegged back to Ferrari's level.

Ferrari spent the last of its three available tokens to bring a new engine to Monza this year, but struggled to get within a second of the W07 on pure pace.

Last year Kimi Raikkonen qualified 0.234s adrift of Hamilton's pole position time; this year the qualifying gap between Hamilton and the best Ferrari ballooned to more than eight tenths.

OK this season Pirelli brought the super-soft tyre to Monza for the first time, but usually this compound has been good news for Ferrari.

It was back to being the second fastest team on this circuit, but there is no doubt that overall Ferrari has slipped back into the clutches of Red Bull, rather than pushing on to challenge Mercedes.

Red Bull's rate of progress has been impressive, but only enough to threaten a faltering Ferrari. And on such a power hungry circuit as this, Red Bull found itself sucked back into a fight with the Mercedes customer teams, rather than continuing its recent battles with the Scuderia.

The fact Renault is likely to finish the season with leftover development tokens, even if its latest engine update is ready in time for the next race in Singapore, suggests it will need to enact a major redesign to stand a chance of finding the sort of performance that can genuinely threaten Mercedes.

Ditto Honda, which has improved its Energy Recovery Systems impressively, but lacks the sort of efficient combustion technology that could really put McLaren back in the mix. McLaren struggled at Monza, having thrust itself to the front of the midfield during recent grands prix.

Mercedes introduced a substantial engine update of its own for the previous round at Spa. It won that race relatively comfortably, but difficulties extracting performance from the super-soft Pirelli tyre in searing heat on such a high-energy circuit limited the car's potential and brought it back towards the rest of the field.

It endured no such struggles at Monza, allowing Mercedes to unleash more of the potential of that potent new engine and underline its superiority over the rest.

Honda F1 chief Yusuke Hasegawa described Mercedes' engine performance as "incredible", while Red Bull boss Christian Horner said Monza is the place that really highlights Mercedes' edge under the current regulations.

"This is a pure horsepower circuit - slow-speed corners, long straights, so it's a very clear delta of where things are at," he said. "I don't think it's a surprise to anyone. We're in a better position than 12 months ago, but there's still some way to go to close that down."

F1's competitive order is generally meant to close up as particular sets of technical regulations mature and teams better understand how to find performance within those boundaries, but it seems in V6 hybrid turbo F1 Mercedes is stretching ever further away.

So it was here. Mercedes was completely in charge of the Italian Grand Prix from beginning to end, despite Ferrari's brief cameo at the start.

Except the Mercedes in charge wasn't the one everyone was expecting. Hamilton utterly dominated team-mate Rosberg in qualifying, taking pole by nearly half a second with an awesome performance to which Rosberg could muster no riposte.

"Lewis had his best day of the year, and when he has his best day of the year he's very difficult to beat," Rosberg rued.

But Hamilton did not enjoy one of his best days on Sunday, wheelspinning away his pole advantage with a terrible start.

Instead of being away and into a comfortable lead, Hamilton found himself driving out of the first chicane in sixth, behind Rosberg, both Ferraris, the Williams of Valtteri Bottas and Daniel Ricciardo's Red Bull.

"I'm told it wasn't a driver error but it wasn't anyone's error," Hamilton said, rather confusingly. "We continue to have an inconsistency with our clutch - you saw it with Nico at Hockenheim.

"It's bitten me quite a lot this year. The procedure was done exactly how I was supposed to do it, but unfortunately we had an over delivery of torque and the wheels were just spinning from the get-go."

This has been a real weak spot for Hamilton this season, and he is a driver who doesn't have many of those.

His starts in Australia, Bahrain, Spain, Canada and Italy have all been poor, though it's also true Rosberg has recently suffered bad getaways of his own in Hungary and Germany.

"This has been a hard year for us with our clutch," Hamilton added. "It's not a quick fix, so it's not something we can change for the next race.

"We have made improvements, so you've seen better starts, but we are still caught out by the random variation that we have from one start to another.

"We do practice starts all weekend and they are varying a little bit, and then every now and then we get a drastic variation."

In a more competitive era of Formula 1 this could potentially ruin Hamilton's race and championship ambitions, but such was Mercedes' advantage here he was able to stage a relatively straightforward recovery drive to second, and maintain a slender two-point championship lead.

He breezed back past Ricciardo around the outside of Curve Grande at the start of lap two of 53, drafted easily past Bottas on the main straight at the start of lap 11 after getting a good launch off the Parabolica, and overcame both Ferraris when they made their second pitstops with around 20 laps left to run.

This was a two-stop race for most of the field, but such was Mercedes' advantage both drivers progressed through Q2 on the soft tyre, started on a harder tyre than their nearest rivals, then made it through the grand prix comfortably with only one stop.

But Hamilton paid dearly for that poor start. By the time the Ferraris pitted out of his way for the first time he trailed Rosberg by nearly 15 seconds, which turned out to be his final deficit at the finish.

ROSBERG VS HAMILTON BEFORE FIRST PITSTOPS

A slow stop for Rosberg as his new right-front medium Pirelli butted heads with the old soft one coming off his car allowed Hamilton to close to within less than 11.5s when both Mercedes pitstops had shaken out at the end of lap 26.

Hamilton was a touch faster in the early part of the final stint, but Rosberg was more than a match for Hamilton on the medium tyre, and Hamilton also lost time when he misjudged his entry to the Rettifilo chicane at the start of lap 41 - forcing him to abort the corner and clatter across the sleeping policemen laying offline.

ROSBERG VS HAMILTON IN FINAL STINT

"The gap was 15 seconds at one point and I brought it down to nine seconds, but unfortunately that's too big to close with the tyres we have," Hamilton explained.

"I could have kept going at the pace I was going and maybe I would have brought the gap down to six seconds, but that's still not enough to win the race.

"To close a 15s gap you're going to have to go several tenths of a second per lap quicker over that span of time, and you're not going to have any tyres left to get past.

"If I was eight seconds behind from the beginning then I would have put some pressure on and maybe been in a better position, but 15 seconds is a long way to come back with the way the tyres are today.

"Nico drove a great race. He was faultless. Once you are out in front here it's relatively simple [if you] keep the car on track. All he had to do was match some of my times and he was sorted."

How deliciously ironic for Rosberg that Hamilton should struggle in pursuit and suffer a mishap under braking at the exact same spot at which Rosberg threw away the 2014 race here with two big errors under braking while under pressure from Hamilton.

This year he suffered no such ignominy, leading home a comfortable one-two for his team - their 27th in 52 races since the V6 hybrid turbo engines were introduced in 2014.

When Red Bull dominated the final four seasons of the V8 era, it only scored 12 one-twos in 77 races...

Even Hamilton, one of the two drivers that benefits most from the massive technical superiority of the Mercedes, expressed some disappointment on the podium that this race wasn't closer or more exciting.

"I don't know if it's fantastic for the fans in the sense that there should have been more of us racing [up front]," he said. "There should have been a bigger race between Ferrari and us this weekend. Hopefully in the future there will be."

Vettel used the tyre advantage afforded him by a two-stop strategy and running a softer compound than the Mercedes drivers for the final stint to close back in on Hamilton over the final 18 laps of the race, finishing less than six seconds behind the second Mercedes.

HAMILTON VS VETTEL IN FINAL STINT

But this does little to mask the fact that Ferrari was again miles away from challenging for victory at its home race.

Even with a strategy that team principal Maurizio Arrivabene described as "aggressive" - and calculated to be 11s quicker than the one-stop race Mercedes completed - Vettel still finished nearly 21s adrift of victory. Last season he finished 25s behind at this race, without any strategic variation...

Mercedes deserves all the credit in the world for the superb job it has done in making the most of these regulations, but any sport will naturally suffer for a lack of close competition, and Monza showcased yet again just how far we are from seeing Mercedes genuinely challenged by an external threat.

For now we must console ourselves with the prospect of a seven-race showdown between two drivers for the world championship, and the fact Singapore comes next - a race where engines count for less and Mercedes struggled so badly in 2015.