Lewis Hamilton’s elimination in the first round of qualifying at Jeddah Corniche Circuit was undoubtedly the biggest surprise of the session.
Unreliability and the occasional crash aside, Hamilton has almost invariably sailed through the first round of qualifying for over a decade. But he came unstuck under the lights in Saudi Arabia after risking just a little too much in his attempt to wring performance from the W13, a car which was over two-thirds of a second off the pace in Bahrain a week ago.
“We’re still experimenting with set-ups to find out where the sweet spot of the car is,” Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff explained in response to a question from RaceFans. “On Lewis’s side they went a bit bolder and the outcome was that basically they had no rear end in the car. And that explains that big lap time deficit.”
Hamilton was six tenths of a second slower than his team mate on the same rubber when he dropped out at the end of Q1. “I had no rear end,” he…