Mercedes Technical Director James Allison has blamed the “uncharacteristic” error Lewis Hamilton made in the Chinese Grand Prix on its “tricky” 2024 Formula 1 car.
Hamilton had strung together an encouraging beginning to the Shanghai round as he capitalised on damp conditions to convert second place on the grid in the Sprint.
However, the Briton’s weekend went downhill from that point as a lock-up into the Turn 14 hairpin on his last run in qualifying resigned him to a surprise Q1 elimination.
Hamilton, who would battle through from 18th to ninth in the race, rued an experimental set-up choice contributing to him battling extreme understeer on his Mercedes.
Allison admits that Hamilton’s sudden struggles show the risks associated with utilising the revised Sprint format enabling set-up alterations to be made mid-weekend.
Speaking on the review video that Mercedes records at the conclusion of each round, Allison said: “The two parc ferme rule which allows us another stab at setting up the car between the Sprint part of the weekend and the proper part of the weekend,”
“I said this is a very welcome rule change but also a double-edged sword. If you make the wrong choices between the Sprint part of the weekend and the main event, you can end up making the car slower and suffer accordingly and although you get this opportunity to adjust the car, your first taste of the adjustments you’ve made are in qualifying, in Q1.
“So if you’ve chosen poorly then you will suffer and the first time you’ll know you’re suffering is when it really counts.”
Allison believes that replicating team-mate George Russell’s run plan in the opening stage would have seen Hamilton progress with ease to the pole position shootout.
“I would say, well I don’t need to guess about this because Lewis was absolutely explicit about it afterwards, he said he really wished he had taken the same approach that George had taken which was in his first run in Q1, George fuelled to do two timed laps so that he could have a feel of the car in the first flying lap, do a cool-down lap and then have another bite at the cherry which would just give him more of a feel for the car,” he continued.
“Whereas Lewis went later in the session, one timed lap, one timed lap and Lewis was very clear afterwards that he needed another lap.
“He’d found that the changes he’d made had made the car more understeery, they’d made it easier for the car to lock up under the braking and he was just pinching those front brakes in a way that was causing him difficulties.
“I think we all saw what happened on his second run, which was only his second timed lap therefore, running down the main straight into that bottom hairpin, he just got a little bit out of shape on the braking, went deep and that’s 0.7 of a second just there. That’s quite a big gap without which he would have easily got through to Q3 and whatever.”
Allison has underlined that Mercedes must shoulder the blame for producing an unstable car this term that can trigger such “uncharacteristic” errors from the drivers.
“So he [Hamilton] would hold his hand up and say “my mistake, my error”,” he recalled.
“I think we would be a little more rounded and say we should have actually encouraged more strongly that he was pursuing a programme a bit more like George’s, so that’s our mistake and we should frankly be making a car that is just not so tricky as the one we’ve got at the moment which is causing the drivers to make very uncharacteristic errors.
“We have two of the best drivers in the world and locking up at the end of a straight into a hairpin is not in Lewis’s recipe book and it’s a consequence of the car being too tricky.”
