Lewis Hamilton said the set-up changes he made to his car before qualifying “didn’t work” after being eliminated in the first round of qualifying for the Chinese Grand Prix.
The Mercedes driver started the morning’s sprint race from the front row of the grid. However a scruffy final lap in qualifying means he will start the grand prix from 18th place.
Hamilton started his final lap of the session strongly and looked on course to qualify comfortably after the first two sectors. However he locked up and ran wide at the hairpin, then made a further mistake at the final corner.
The turn 14 error alone cost Hamilton more than half a second. He ended the session a tenth of a second away from reaching Q2.
“I struggled,” he told Sky afterwards. “I made massive changes into qualifying. It wasn’t too bad in some places but I struggled. I couldn’t get it to stop in turn 14.”
“It is what it is,” he added. “I’ll have fun from back there.”
Formula 1’s revised sprint event rules for this season allow drivers to make set-up changes between the two sessions on Saturday. Hamilton said he and team mate George Russell diverged on their set-up choices at that point.
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“This morning George and I had very similar cars,” he said. “But this afternoon, we’re trying to experiment still with the car, so I went one way, a long way, and then he went the other way, just to see if we can find anything. That’s what we need to do at the moment but it didn’t work.”
Hamilton said he’ll “give it my best shot” from his lowly qualifying position, but admitted “18th is pretty bad.
“But when I was making the set-up changes, I was like ‘it can’t get any worse’ surely’. And it did. Shit happens.”
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said the changes they made to the car were prompted by Russell’s pace on soft tyres in the sprint race earlier in the day.
“With George, the soft tyre was a bit of an experiment that we wanted to try. It held on better than expected and that opens up more possibilities for Sunday. Ultimately, we knew that we had outperformed where the true pace of our car was in the sprint.
“We therefore decided to make some big set-up changes between the sprint and qualifying to try and improve the car’s low-speed performance. The drivers chose to go in pretty different directions to support our learning process, but it clearly didn’t work for us today on a single lap….
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