Lewis Hamilton says he and Mercedes “completely missed the ball” and made the W12 “worse than ever” after his qualifying slump in Monaco.
Hamilton was only seventh-best in Saturday’s final practice session and was then never in contention for leading honours during qualifying.
Hamilton wound up seventh overall, seven-tenths of a second adrift of Charles Leclerc, and behind even McLaren’s Lando Norris and AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly.
“Today was a question of tyres, the tyres just not working,” he said. “Sliding around.”
Expanding further he said: “There are things that should have been done which haven’t been done. We’ll learn from it and come together stronger in the next race.
“I can’t really [say]. But as I said, from my point it’s a little frustrating, but it is what it is. I can’t really say too much about it.
“Also I don’t want to be critical of team, but behind closed doors, I will be. We’ve got to work harder.”
Hamilton revealed that Mercedes did “lots of changes to the car after FP3, as FP3 was a disaster, and that was from the work done over the last day or so.
“[It was] completely [the] wrong direction, [we] completely missed the ball. Then we made some changes to try and take steps backwards and move the car into a different place and the car was worse than ever. I think we really lost our way from Thursday.”
On the tyre warm-up issue Hamilton confirmed that “definitely we struggle, and it’s magnified here, as it’s a low energy circuit, there’s not many high-speed areas.
“Today was much, much cooler, you saw it get worse over the day. I’m not really sure how Valtteri [Bottas] was able to get his tyres working. I saw a glimpse of grip on that last lap, but it was short-lived. It will be a lot of analysis.
“P7 is not a great place to start here, but I’ll need to do best I can. Damage limitation tomorrow and see if there’s a way to move forward tomorrow.”
A team can only prepare a car as well as the driver’s input allows. Looked to me like Hamilton, for one reason or another, just didn’t get the job done; but in typical fashion won’t take the blame.
We are in for a treat tomorrow. There are those who hate to give Lewis any credit. To me, Hamilton shows his class when coming from behind. This is still Monaco where overtaking is extremely rare and difficult.
It is Hamilton’s fault for the qualifying but when Hamilton wins 7 WDC, 98 wins, 100 poles it is the car and team not him
Jump off a bridge
Hamilton rarely makes a mistake, at least from what I have seen since 2016. And when he does, he’s always puts his hand up and acknowledges it.
Also very often he disagrees with a strategy call and when the call works, he’s always given his team their just due. Always. So I’m inclined to let it slide this one time, that he’s basically criticized his team publicly, while saying he doesn’t want to throw them under the bus.
I’m looking forward to seeing how he and his team deal with the “impossible ” tomorrow. If they fail spectacularly, well then, stuff happens, shake it off, do better in Azerbaijan.
In the meantime, I will still enjoy the race even if my best guy is not at the front.
But a driver of his magnitude always has some say in the strategy call, this is the problem with his complaining and acting like a child when things don’t go well for him. He has a very embarrassing history of doing this (sharing Button’s telemetry on Twitter when he couldn’t beat him, accusing Mercedes of sabotaging his engines in 2016 when Rosberg had the same luck the year prior, blaming the team when he underperforms, etc). It’s quite simple — Hamilton got beat by his crappy teammate in Monaco qualifying (and all weekend during practice) and he can’t handle it. Let’s see if he can rebound during the race.