Mercedes was delighted with their vehicles following the US Grand Prix, but the W14s’ performance in qualifying in Mexico left them perplexed once more.
Lewis Hamilton lamented his “peaky” Mercedes following a lackluster qualifying effort for the Mexican Grand Prix.
Last weekend in Austin, Hamilton and teammate George Russell were happy with the improvements to their cars. However, in practice at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, the Silver Arrows found it difficult to generate the same kind of energy.
And that continued into qualifying. Both Brits reached the final part of the session, but Hamilton was only sixth fastest on the road and faced a potential penalty for a yellow flag infringement, while Russell is set to start two places further back on the grid.
“I’ve been struggling all weekend with the car and it has been a bit of a nightmare to drive,” said the disappointed seven-time world champion after qualifying. “We’ve had to try and put the performance together piece by piece, and we made good changes going into qualifying so that I was much happier with the car.
“Q1 and Q2 weren’t looking too bad, especially the second run in Q2. But the car is just really peaky – sometimes it’s in the window, sometimes not. And I couldn’t squeeze anything more out of it on that final lap.
“The race is definitely going to be a challenge – we will be overheating the tyres and the brakes, so it won’t be easy to battle the cars around us. I don’t really know what kind of race to expect but it’s going to be on a knife edge.”
Russell was also visibly disappointed with the fruits of his labour. “It was a bit of a shame to end up P8 because we showed signs of strong pace at points, but we didn’t deliver when it counted,” he declared. “We lacked consistency today – some runs we were strong, others not, so it was a confusing picture. On the final run, we had one set of new tyres and tried something different on the out lap and it didn’t work and the tyres weren’t in the window.
“As for [the race], it will be hard from P8. The brakes will need managing and PU temperatures are always a challenge, too. We came here expecting to be competitive and I hope we can make progress in the race, but it won’t be easy.”
Furthermore, Toto Wolff, the team principal, believed that both of his drivers could have more. “P6 and P8 are less than we had hoped for from qualifying today,” the Austrian stated. Although we made some progress with the car today, when it came down to it, we were unable to combine our lap times.
Although we are only three tenths of a second off the pole, considering where we started, it feels like much more. Although we demonstrated some respectable race pace yesterday, we are unsure if it will carry over to tomorrow given the set-up changes we made. However, our only objective will be to proceed from our starting point.
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