Neither Hamilton nor George Russell were in contention for pole in Japanese GP qualifying, with Mercedes’ cars well off the performance of Max Verstappen and his fearsome Red Bull
Lewis Hamilton has doubled down on his desire to change the concept of his Mercedes car after disappointing qualifying at Suzuka.
The seven-time world champion will start the Japanese Grand Prix seventh. He out-qualified team-mate George Russell who was one place further back, but was behind the Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren cars.
To answer this part, he explained what was missing from his car. “Yesterday was a bad day. Every weekend, out of three days, we have at least one bad day,” the Briton said.
“The balance didn’t feel great yesterday, we did some changes and good work overnight, and the car has felt generally really nice today. It has been nice to drive through P3, so I’ve been feeling much more confident.
Then, in qualifying, I was giving it everything but that seven tenths deficit we have in sector one, it’s all rear end. Our car has loads of load on the front and not as much as we need on the rear. So we’re a really long way down on that and for me, it’s 100 per cent clear that’s [a concept issue] and we have got to make sure we change that for next year, which hopefully we will.”
For Russell, P8 was about what he had expected. He said: “Today was a fair representation of how we perform on circuits that have similar characteristics to Suzuka. There’s a large range of corners where we have plenty of high-speed and some very low-speed turns too.
Our car didn’t perform at its best in all the corners, so we had a bit more difficulty here, especially in the first sector. Last week we saw in Singapore that if we can find a good position for the car on tracks that require high downforce, then we can fight at the front. That’s not the case here.”
Neither of the Mercedes drivers ever threatened to come close to a pole position charge. In truth, no-one did with Max Verstappen more than half-a-second clear of his nearest competitor after a monster final lap at the end of Q3.
Sky Sports pundit Karun Chandhok looked awestruck as he gave his verdict on the Dutchman’s performance. He said: “I’m still breathless watching that. I think that was one of the great qualifying laps we’ve seen in F1 history. There’s not much left on the table.
“The detail with which he drove, pinching little bits down on the entry to Spoon Curve, 130R, not using all the width – he thought about every detail and, to me, that’s a driver who is ahead of the car. Christian was saying that’s one of the special laps and he’s right. If they didn’t have Max in the car, they’d be on the second row of the grid.”