Lewis Hamilton said 12th on the grid was a realistic reflection of Mercedes’ performance as they languished seven-tenths of a second off the pace in Miami.
He and team mate George Russell both failed to reach the top 10 in qualifying for tomorrow’s sprint race. As has happened several times this year, Hamilton said the car felt in better shape before they started trying to adjust it.
“The car felt really good in [first practice],” he told the official F1 channel. “And then in [sprint race qualifying], I mean, it didn’t feel terrible it’s just we’re seven-tenths off. That’s just, I think, the pace of our car.”
Hamilton has attempted some aggressive changes to his car in past races which haven’t always worked, but he said that wasn’t the case this weekend.
“This weekend we’ve just been [doing] no more experiments, just trying to make the car work,” he said. “So I feel like we extracted everything from the car and that’s just our pace, we just have to accept it for the moment that we’re seven-tenths off.”
Mercedes have brought an upgrade package for their car this weekend. However with points only available to the top eight in tomorrow’s race, Hamilton was downbeat about his chances of scoring.
“The sprint race is going to be tough,” he said. “We’re in 12th so I don’t expect a huge amount from there, to be honest.
“It’s not an easy circuit to overtake on or to follow. So [I’ll] just try to step into the points somehow, if we can.”
Russell said the W15 felt better on the soft tyres earlier in the day but struggled for pace on the medium compounds which they had to use in the first two phases of qualifying.
“In practice the soft tyre was feeling really good on our car. The pace was good, it was P4. On the medium we just couldn’t get the sweet spot and I found myself on the wrong side of it.
“It was tight out there. We shouldn’t have been in a position to be that close to the margin to the cut-off. We need to work overnight and make some improvements for the main quali.”
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2024 Miami Grand Prix
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