Lewis Hamilton faces a difficult season with a car that does not fit the desired performance at Mercedes, as they are far from the fastest. After two races, Ferrari and Red Bull have proven to be one step above Brackley’s, even at specific moments they have been overtaken by Alpine, McLaren and Haas, which has led the seven-time champion to suffer a lot.
The British driver landed in Australia with the intention of reversing the situation, but after continuing to suffer from the problems of the W13 , in Melbourne qualifying, he could barely get past fifth place.
This is an improvement compared to the previous appointment in Saudi Arabia, where he was eliminated in Q1, but Hamilton acknowledges that this is not his real position because Carlos Sainz was missing from the equation: “It is where I am. There is a Ferrari that should have been in front of us, so I’m thankful for that position, we haven’t made any progress.
“I don’t know what’s coming yet, but I’m very, very hopeful,” said the Englishman when asked if Mercedes will update its car at Imola. “I know everyone is working very hard, but we’ve had three races and no progress in those three grands prix.
“I really hope that over this next week we’ll be able to get as much information as possible from tomorrow’s race and that we’ll be able to somehow figure out how we can fix something for the next round,” Lewis Hamilton explained before meeting his engineers in the afternoon. australian
The German team has dominated in the hybrid era with an iron fist, however, with the radical change in technical rules, they have lost part of that performance, falling to the mid zone . Mercedes knows that reclaiming the throne won’t happen overnight: “It takes a long time to do things, I’d say there’s nothing exciting at the moment.”
“I wish I could be optimistic, like next time we have something better, but at the moment we don’t,” Hamilton continued. “It’s a second away, it’s a pretty big gap, but I enjoy the role of working with the team.”
“I don’t have a good time driving this car, but with the collaboration, helping the mechanics, knowing that there is a big mountain to climb, and keeping hope, we will make it,” said the seven-time world champion.
When put to the table what was the weak point of the Silver Arrows car , he said: “Everywhere. I don’t want to say that in some areas it’s terrible, just that it’s not as fast as the others, where I’m really discontent is with the porpoising, which is the worst thing about this car, and we can’t get rid of it now.”
He also wondered how this annoying rebound effect did not affect the Ferrari car: “I don’t understand it, and I think nobody does, I wish ours were the same, but it isn’t.”
The F1 paddock was filled with criticism for the safety of the cars of the new regulation with the porpoising, and the Briton indicated that it was dangerous: “It can be in certain scenarios, I think it is good that they have removed the DRS from the straight of back, because we had so much porpoising that I had a moment of oversteer in the middle of the straight itself, it was ridiculous”.
