It's a less than ideal return from holiday for the seven-time world champion. After three consecutive podiums, including two wins at Silverstone and Spa, Hamilton's results have fallen drastically as the Mercedes driver has yet to return to the podium since the end of the summer break. In Baku, he had a fluctuating weekend, with the car behaving very differently from one day to the next. On Friday, the car seemed to live up to his expectations, with the former McLaren driver finishing second and then third in the first two free practice sessions and explaining to the media, including GpBlogthat he felt very comfortable aboard the W15. However, in order to find even more performance, the Briton decided to modify some settings on his single-seater, a decision that he soon regretted.
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A great Friday but a bit behind on Saturday and Sunday
“I barely changed anything on the car, because I didn't want to mess anything up, and the tires didn't want to work. All day long, they didn't work.”summed up Hamilton, very frustrated with the turn of events. While he seemed well on his way to being one of the contenders for pole position, the future Ferrari driver finished only seventh in qualifying after his team discovered that a component of his car was not correctly assembled, which forced him to try a different set-up which did not bear fruit. At the same time, his poor position in qualifying prompted Mercedes to change his engine, which forced him to start from the pit lane.
On a technical circuit where overtaking is not easy, the race was expected to be difficult and unfortunately, this trend was confirmed on Sunday with a race finished in an anonymous ninth place, helped by the clash between Sainz and Perez at the end of the race. The frustration was palpable on Hamilton's face at the end of the Grand Prix, the Briton explaining that he suffered major handling problems, which forced him to pull on his steering wheel and drive in a different way to get his Mercedes to turn. “It was probably the worst balance I’ve ever had,” Hamilton said. “I had so much downforce at the front and nothing at the rear. I had to pull on the steering wheel to break the front grip and slide the car through every corner. It was the strangest way to drive.”
Toto Wolff justifies Hamilton's penalty
An uncomfortable situation for the Mercedes driver, made worse by the fact that he had to fight through the pack after starting from the last row on the grid. The boss of the German team, Toto Wolff, explained the reasons for this choice, specifying that the team has high hopes for the Austin Grand Prix, where it will introduce its new floor, and that Baku represented the best race to move up thanks to its long straights. “We decided to make the engine change here and we knew it would be a race of suffering, because it is so difficult to overtake in Baku,” said the Austrian. “And that's what it was. As soon as you get close, you overheat the tires and then you back off.”
“There were two different philosophies and we talked about it at length. You just have to swallow the pill here, because going from P7, we didn’t know where it was going to go, or you do it in Austin. But we think Austin is an opportunity, so that’s the decision we made. Good or bad, I don’t know. It was a tough choice.”
An inconsistency that the team cannot explain
Mercedes hopes that this new feature will provide answers to the team, which decided this weekend to return to an old floor model, which did not give complete satisfaction in terms of the performances of the two single-seaters, very inconsistent from one day to the next, or even from one stint to the next, if we take the example of George Russell. The winner of the Austrian Grand Prix experienced a race with two faces, with a very complicated first part of the event with the medium tires, and a second stint with the hard tires, where he was one of the fastest men on the track. Versatile performances that Toto Wolff highlighted.
“A difficult start to the race, I think it’s complicated when you’re in a train and you’re fighting for position, but clearly our car is not good enough. And the second stint was really incredible. Difficult at the beginning, but once the car found its balance, because George was driving it the way it should be driven, we were sometimes the quickest car,” explained the Austrian, who reveals that the pace of the single-seaters varies from one Grand Prix to another depending on the layout of the track, the correct use of the tyres, and the balance of the cars, an element that Mercedes and Red Bull lack, which explains their poor performances since Formula 1 returned to Zandvoort after the summer break.
The Brackley team must nevertheless react quickly to get back on the winning track. Their balance problems must be resolved as soon as possible, because Singapore is a track where drivers need a stable car in order to pass the many corners of the circuit and avoid accidents, since in the same way as in Baku, the walls are very close and mistakes can happen quickly.
