Asking the team if it was "impossible to catch" Rosberg, the World Champion was told "we should just consolidate the position."

Hamilton was not happy about hearing that.

"It's not nice for a driver ever to hear that," he said on Sunday night. "I'm here to race; I'm not here to finish second, so naturally I ignored that."

The Brit continued to push hard, forcing Rosberg to do the same.

But once he realised the task was fruitless, he backed off to cross the line 17 seconds behind his team-mate.

Hamilton challenged the decision which had been made that he should ‘stay out’, and told the team, “these tyres are going to drop in temperature”.
.......

Yet one of the cold hard realities in the post mortem will be, had Hamilton simply obeyed the instructions from the team to “stay out”, the fateful pit stop would never have taken place. Add to that, Lewis was unhappy with the team’s strategy which failed to pit him last year, and so he added an incremental element of doubt into the confusion over whether Lewis should receive a change of tyres.
.......

Lewis conceded in the media pen, “I feel content in my heart; I did everything I could,” admitting “It was a collective decision.”

Of course it was Mercedes pit wall who failed to correctly asses at the last corner that Lewis no longer had a sufficient gap to get in and get out and remain in the lead, but by then the die was cast and it had been decided that Lewis would be coming into the pits.
.....

He led Rosberg by 19.349s at the moment the virtual safety car was deployed, but needed more than 24s in hand to resume the race in front of the pack. The fastest pitstop duration of the entire race was Kimi Raikkonen's sole stop on lap 37, which took 24.177s, meaning Hamilton was already 4.826s shy of the gap he needed - even without the fact his extra stop was another 1.318s slower than Ferrari's benchmark (on account of having to wait for Felipe Nasr's Sauber to drive past in the pitlane).

So the question on everyone's lips after seeing Rosberg, not Hamilton, win the 62nd running of the Monaco Grand Prix was: why on Earth did Mercedes decide to make that extra stop?

"The simple answer is we got the math, the calculation wrong," explained team boss Toto Wolff, during a packed media briefing in the Mercedes motorhome. "We thought we had a gap which we didn't have when the safety car came out. In Monaco, you have no GPS and that makes the whole exercise more difficult - this is why we got it wrong when it switched from the virtual safety into the safety car.