Lewis Hamilton savages Mercedes car as team miles off it at Brazilian Grand Prix

Lewis Hamilton was in a frustrated mood at the Brazilian Grand Prix on Saturday.

Lewis Hamilton pulled no punches when assessing his Mercedes machinery after an uncharacteristically poor sprint race at the Brazilian Grand Prix. The Brit described his car as ‘all over the place’, labelling his race ‘one of the worst of the year’.

Hamilton just missed the cut-off line for SQ3 in the sprint qualifying session on Friday, resigning him to a P11 grid slot for Saturday’s race. Unfortunately for the seven-time world champion, he got stacked up at the race start and dropped to as low as 14th on the road.

With slower cars ahead, the Mercedes driver got caught up in a DRS train with the Williams car of Alex Albon at the head. Hamilton made some progress and climbed to P11 after a late Nico Hulkenberg DNF, but was unable to rescue any points.

When Sky Sports F1 asked him about the race, he replied: “Probably one of the worst of the year. The car was all over the place. It was a real, real struggle. Our car does not like this track. At least we have some time now to make some changes going into qualifying. We definitely can’t make it worse.”

Mercedes have been struggling a lot with the bouncy feel of the Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace this weekend with the newly paved surface affecting Hamilton and teammate George Russell much in the during races.

As we have seen the W15 struggle so massively over this undulating terrain, Mercedes has been left with no option but to add more height to its car and as is normally the practice, this compromises on speed. The team faced some ordeals on Friday we had some good things to say from Russell in response to this.

“In 2022, in the porpoising era, without a doubt that that was a lot more uncomfortable, but because of the characteristics of those cars,” he said. “It was far harder to get close to the limit because it meant you were driving round every single corner, and you knew that it was going to catch you out.”

The situation becomes we have with this car at the moment is you think it is not going to bite you and you can get a really great lap and then, all of a sudden nothing has changed or the following lap you do not feel anything has changed and you lose all of that performance.

So I have no doubt that, this is probably the most erratic our performance has been as a team in probably ever.”

Russell barely scored a P6 during the sprint race but was unable to close the gap on the Ferrari, McLaren, and Red Bull cars ahead of him, let alone for a few laps. However, he had no choice but to glance in the rearview mirror as he tried to fend off Pierre Gasly and Sergio Perez.