“I’m insanely slow” – Every message from Hamilton’s Shanghai slog · RaceFans

Lewis Hamiltonlooked like he had found something very encouraging over the opening two days of the Chinese Grand Prix weekend.

The Mercedes driver secured a front row start for the sprint race in a wet sprint qualifying session and had led the early laps of Saturday morning’s race before being caught by eventually winner Max Verstappen.

But then he made some significant changes to his car set-up between the sprint race and grand prix qualifying on Saturday evening. Whatever he changed, it did not seem to pay off in the slightest. While his Mercedes team mate George Russell easily reached Q3, Hamilton was eliminated from Q1 to start down in 18th position.

What followed was a race defined by chronic understeer and trouble finding any kind of sustained grip from his tyres – even though he had the supposed benefit of softs at the start of the race. Here is how the story of Hamilton’s race unfolded over the radio.

Soft tyre struggles

With several sets of new softs available to him and a lowly grid position, it was little shock that Mercedes decided to start the race with Hamilton on the fastest tyre compound. However, Hamilton was baffled by his inability to make seemingly any progress up the order in the early laps.

RB driver Yuki Tsunoda was also on softs and had gotten ahead of Hamilton and two others at the start to run ahead of him in 16th once Hamilton passed Zhou Guanyu. But when Mercedes decided to pit Hamilton off of the softs, they were beaten to it by the cars ahead, leaving Hamilton out for an extra lap before finally making his first stop for mediums.

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